In the European political discourse, the potentially vast economic benefits derived from the European Union are taken for granted. In the academic debate, these economic benefits, even if measured in terms of GDP per capita growth, are much less consensual. There are severe methodological...

We discuss the contribution of autocratic tendencies in democratically elected political leaders to the economic growth of developed economies. To this end, we exploit the unique election of Sir Charles Court as state premier of Western Australia in 1975 to estimate the contribution of...

The Synthetic Control Method has become a widely used tool in estimating the causal impact of policies, shocks and interventions of interest on economic and social outcomes. The technique has become particularly popular in estimating the effect of these shocks on a single treated unit. As a...

This article re-examines the relationship between constitutional monarchy and economic growth in Europe. We suggest that economic growth explains the survival of constitutional monarchy rather than vice versa. The empirical results are consistent with our hypothesis

This article examines the importance of institutional shocks for long-run development with an application to the Iranian revolution. Our empirical method offers a clear test to distinguish between three models of institutional change. We define gradual institutional change without a major shock,...

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...

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...