Recent studies have claimed that states with initiatives systems of legislation use this more direct from of democracy to improve productive resource allocation. This paper compares the economic performance of states with initiatives to states that do not have initiatives. We first construct a...

This paper investigates the implications of how states with initiative systems of legislation can use this more direct form of democracy to improve productive resource alloction by their governments. We construct a simple growth model whereby we can identify this channel through which...

Recent studies have claimed that states with initiative systems of legislation use this more direct form of democracy to improve productive resource allocation. This paper compares the economic performance of states with initiatives to states that do not have initiatives. We first construct a...