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...

This paper studies the joint effect of economic and political inequalities on redistributive taxation and institutional quality. The theoretical model suggests that income inequality, coupled with political bias in favor of the rich, decreases redistribution and lowers institutional quality. The...

Drawing on previously unused objective institutional data, we provide evidence for the causal link between rent-seeking behavior and democracy in Uruguay, a country where both rent-seeking behavior and political shifts have varied widely in the last 80 years, but where ethnolinguistic...

Using objective institutional historical data we test the link between extent, duration, and transparency in democracies and rent-seeking behavior using time-series and panel data approaches. In this paper we focus on the case of Uruguay, an ethnically homogeneous country. We find three main...

The aim of this paper is to provide comprehensive empirical evidence on recent theories that link democracy and income inequality for the period 1960-1995. In simple cross-country regressions I find a non-monotonic link between these two variables when using ordinary least squares, instrumental...