This paper explores empirically the relation between special-interest groups and economic growth. Our analysis exploits new data on the number of groups observed across countries and time, in order to mitigate the identification problems associated with earlier studies. Also in contrast to...

A 1999 study by Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys found the presence of major sports franchises to have no significant impact on the growth rate of per capita personal income and to be negatively correlated with the level of per capita personal income for a sample of all cities that had been...