"The authors use a sample of 147 countries to investigate the link between democracy and reforms. Democracy may be conducive to reforms, because politicians have the incentive to embrace growth-enhancing reforms to win elections. By contrast, authoritarian regimes do not have to worry as much...

Using objective measures of business regulation in 135 countries, we establish that countries with better regulations grow faster. Improving from the worst quartile of business regulations to the best implies a 2.3 percentage points increase in annual growth

Students around the world are going to school but are not learning – an emerging gap in human capital formation. To understand this gap, this paper introduces a new data set measuring learning in 164 countries and territories. The data cover 98 percent of the world's population from 2000 to...

Students around the world are going to school but are not learning -- an emerging gap in human capital formation. To understand this gap, this paper introduces a new data set measuring learning in 164 countries and territories. The data cover 98 percent of the world's population from 2000 to...

This paper presents evidence from 29 postcommunist countries that the economic transition has been more successful than the political transformation in the quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The adoption of strong parliamentarian systems has countered the adverse effects of...