The resource curse is a topic studied intensively in both economics and political science. Much of the focus is now on whether oil affects democratic institutions. We further the debate through the use of additional measures of democracy and multiple time-series estimation strategies. We find no...

This issue of the Hispanic Economic Outlook contains the following articles: Hispanic Employment Conditions: QIV 2009; Self-Employment Ratios of Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Other Hispanic Americans in the 2000s, Latin America and the Financial Crisis of 2008: An Overview....

I analyze the effect of inequality on economic growth in Latin America, where inequality is measured as the area of family farms as a percentage of the total area of agricultural holdings. Using data from 18 Latin American countries between 1960 and 2004, I find that inequality has a nonlinear...

This paper investigates the impact of ethanol production in the Corn Belt states (Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin). Employing data at the county level, from 2005 and 2006, we investigate the effect of ethanol...

In a simultaneous model of human and physical capital accumulation for 18 Latin American countries from 1975 to 2004, we show that overall resource dependence is not significantly related to physical and human capital. Disaggregating the natural resource variable into subcategories, we find that...

We investigate the underlying causes of political instability in a panel of 18 Latin American countries from 1971–2000. We test whether regime type, regime durability, factionalism, income inequality, ethnic diversity, ethnic discrimination, regional spillover effects, urban growth and...

What is the “growth penalty” when a country’s entrepreneurship deviates from its optimal level? We use data on entrepreneurship for a panel of developed and developing countries over 2003-2011 to estimate growth equations. We treat the impact of entrepreneurship on real GDP growth as...

We explore the potential of digital financial education programs among Hispanic populations, through the design and evaluation of a mobile phone delivered digital program called Mind Your Money (MYM). This program sought to improve financial knowledge and behavior among low-to-moderate income...