Using bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI) stocks around the world, we explore the importance of a wide range of institutional variables as determinants of the location of FDI. While we find that better institutions have overall a positive and economically significant effect on FDI, some...

This paper explores the link between compulsory voting and income distribution using a cross-section of countries around the world. Our empirical cross-country analysis for 91 countries during the period 1960-2000 shows that when compulsory voting can be strongly enforced the distribution of...

This paper uses a large cross-country survey of business firms to assess their influence on government policies. When controlling for endogeneity, we find that such an influence is associated with larger firms and to a lesser extent with government ownership, but not with the degree of...

The aim of this paper is to provide comprehensive empirical evidence on recent theories that link democracy and income inequality for the period 1960-1997. In simple cross-country regressions I find a non-monotonic link between democracy and inequality when using ordinary least squares,...