Long-term regional convergence hypothesis is examined for 32 Mexican states in a regional growth model with poverty traps using a new dataset on regional income inequality for the period 1940-2011. Although zero-growth poverty trap hypothesis is rejected for 28 out of 32 states, the evidence...

We examine the effect of political factionalism in the presence of weak state capacity on long-term economic growth. To this end, we exploit the 1958 civil uprising between Maronite Christian and Sunni Muslim factions in Lebanon to estimate the impact of factious tensions on long-term growth. To...

This paper quantifies the economic benefits of joining the United States. Adapting extant static synthetic control models into a dynamic model similar to Arellano and Bond (1991), we are able to construct the counterfactual growth paths of Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah,...

This paper presents an attempt to quantify institutional changes and examine the respective effects of de jure and de facto political institutions on the path of long-run economic growth and development for a large panel of countries in the period 1810–2000. Using factor analysis, latent...

The paper examines the evolution of income per capita for a sample of high-income transition countries in the period 1991-2007. The analysis focuses on the dynamics of income per capita convergence throughout the period. We review patterns of income dispersion in Central Europe in a historical...

This paper seeks to quantify the impact of transaction costs on cross-country economic growth. Our evidence from a cross-country panel data regression analysis reveals a persistent and robust negative effect of increasing transaction costs on the path of economic growth. The growth-enhancing...

This paper examines the contribution of administrative and procedural transaction costs to economic growth under common legal system. We show that administrative and procedural costs vary quite a lot even within the institutional environment sharing the common legal system. States with...

I examine the contribution of institutional breakdowns to long-run development, drawing on Argentina's unique departure from a rich country on the eve of World War I to an underdeveloped one today. The empirical strategy is based on building a counterfactual scenario to examine the path of...

This paper seeks to quantify the functioning costs of Mexican property and contract law system for the sub-national panel of Mexican States and Mexico City and examine the respective effects of such increasing costs on sub-national paths of economic growth. Paper identifies a persistent negative...

This paper exploits the variation in the timing of electoral law enforcement across nine Latin American countries to consistently examine the contribution of de jure and de facto political institutions to long-run development. The set of novel measures of electoral law enforcement is constructed...