We explore the relationship between government size and economic growth in an endogenous growth model with human capital and an unproductive capital which facilitates rent-seeking. With exogenous as well as endogenous time discounting, we find a non-monotonic relationship between the size of...

This paper empirically analyzes the influence of rents from natural resources on the composition of government spending and investigates whether the relationship differs between democracies and autocracies. Both panel data and instrumental variable regressions suggest that there is a negative...