This paper examines the causal link between education and democracy. Motivated by a model whereby educated individuals are in a better position to assess the effects of public policies and hence favor democracy where their opinions matter, the empirical analysis uses World Values Surveys to...

Recent empirical work has established that 'democracy causes growth'. In this paper, we determine the underlying institutions which drive this relationship using data from the Varieties of Democracy project. We sketch how incentives and opportunities as well as the distribution of political...

In this paper, we study the effects of economic integration with democracies on individuals' democratic values and on countries' institutions. We combine survey data with country level measures of democracy from 1960 to 2015, and exploit improvements in air, relative to sea, transportation to...

This paper explores whether coups cause increased crisis risk, and if some types of coups are associated with stronger risk. I use a worldwide sample with data on more than 1200 onsets of economic crisis between 1950 and 2019, treat separate effects of military and civilian coup attempts, and...

This paper revisits the relation between democracy, liberalization, and prosperity in transition countries, using a panel of 25 countries over 19 years. Earlier investigations found political and economic liberalization to be positively correlated whereas the relation between political...

This paper examines the causes of Taiwan's exceptional economic performance, focusing on the influence of organizational and policy choices and how Taiwan's example differs from those of more typical less-developed countries. After briefly citing cultural factors as proposed by his late...

Good health is crucial for human and economic development. In particular poor health in childhood seems to be of utmost concern since it causes irreversible damage and have implications later in life. Recent research suggests globalization is a strong force affecting adult and child health...

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy, which enables a very detailed and sensitive index. This method is based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. Our implementation evaluates 188 countries in the period between 1981 and 2011. The Support...

Evidence from a novel measure of democracy (SVMDI) based on Support Vector Machines highlights a robust positive relationship between democracy and economic growth. We argue that the ambiguity in recent studies can be traced back to the neglect of the information in the equation in levels and...