We investigate whether the impact of institutions depends not just on their current state, but also on how they came to be. In particular, we hypothesize that while economic freedom that emerges spontaneously may be growth promoting, economic freedom that emerges as a result of costly lobbying...

We use the Stansel (2013) metropolitan area economic freedom index and 25 conditioning variables to analyze the spatial relationships between institutional quality and economic outcomes across 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Specifically, we allow for spatial dependence in both the dependent and...

Mora and Acevedo (2019) report that the government spending multipliers in Latin American countries are notably higher than what is typically reported for developed economies. Latin American countries have been inclined towards using procyclical fiscal policies. Those policies have been...