Essays in development economics : democracy and education

Essay 1: We reexamine the effect of economic development on the level of democracy based on the data sets of Acemoglu et al. (2008) with a novel regression specification utilizing a zero-one-inflated beta distribution for the response variable democracy. Contrary to the results of Acemoglu et al. (2008), some support of causality is found particularly when explaining heteroscedasticity. We also find democracy is a bimodal variable and approximate the distribution using two separate samples of OECD and non-OECD countries. Our results indicate that higher incomes are associated with higher de...