We estimate the influence of defense spending and military labor use on economic growth in African and Latin American countries. Our model integrates disparate implications from the defense economics literature into a Barro-style model of economic growth that controls for political and economic...

Several cross-country studies have found that corruption is detrimental to economic growth, but the findings are not universally robust. We utilize the economic freedom index to examine if corruption can facilitate growth by allowing entrepreneurs to avoid inefficient policies and regulations...

The secret ballot was designed to eliminate the incentive for candidates to purchase votes through direct vote buying. When voters have private information on their candidate preferences, incumbent candidates will generally be less efficient in purchasing votes than their challengers. Incumbent...

The weak government argument claims that fractionalized governments (coalition or minority governments) have more difficulty increasing their tax revenues or decreasing their spending than majority governments. This implies that weaker governments are associated with higher government deficits....

Previous studies of the U.S. Constitutional Convention have relied on votes recorded for the state blocs or a relatively small number of delegate votes. We construct a new data set covering delegate votes on over 600 substantive roll calls, and use the data in several ways. First, we estimate a...