The housing boom that preceded the Great Recession was due to an increase in credit supply driven by looser lending constraints in the mortgage market. This view on the fundamental drivers of the boom is consistent with four empirical observations: the unprecedented rise in home prices and...

We examine agricultural child labor in the context of emigration, transfers, and the ability to hire outside labor. We start by developing a theoretical background based on Basu and Van, (1998), Basu, (1999, 2000) and Epstein and Kahana (2008) and show how hiring labor from outside the household...

Dynamic panel data methods are used to estimate a growth model using data from 23 transition countries for the period 1990 to 2003. The estimating equation is augmented with country- and time-specific variables for methods of privatization and other factors potentially relevant to growth in...

There are two innovations in the paper as compared to the previous literature on democracy and growth. First, we consider not only the level of democracy, but also changes in this level in the 1970s-1990s as measured by increments of Freedom House political rights indices. Second, the...

The literature has paid very little attention to a potential positive endogenous nexus between trade globalization and political liberalization. In this paper, I apply a structural approach to investigate two-way causality between the two based on the gravity trade theory, using data from a...