Despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature, no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the impact of political democracy on economic growth. This paper challenges the consensus of an inconclusive relationship through a quantitative assessment of the democracy-growth literature....

Card and Krueger’s (1995a) meta-analysis of the employment effects of minimum wages challenged existing theory. Unfortunately, their meta-analysis confused publication selection with the absence of a genuine empirical effect. We apply recently developed meta-analysis methods to 64 US minimum...

Conventional practice is to draw inferences from all available data and research results, even though there is ample evidence to suggest that empirical literatures suffer from publication selection bias. When a scientific literature is plagued by such bias, a simple discarding of the vast...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study a little researched relation: the relation from economic growth in a less developed country to the development aid it receives. Does economic growth influence donor aid allocation decisions? Design/methodology/approach – The authors’ apply...

The aid effectiveness literature (AEL) consists of empirical macroeconomic estimates of the effects of development aid. By the end of 2004, it comprised 97 econometric studies of three families of related effects. Each family has been analyzed in a separate meta-analysis. The AEL is an ideal...

Card and Krueger's meta-analysis of the employment effects of minimum wages challenged existing theory. Unfortunately, their meta-analysis confused publication selection with the absence of a genuine empirical effect. We apply recently developed meta-analysis methods to 64 US minimum-wage...

The AEL (aid effectiveness literature) studies the macroeconomic effects of development aid using cross-country or panel data econometrics. It contains 97 papers of which 43 study whether development aid leads to increasing accumulation. The aggregate results of the 43 studies are that aid...

This note deals with a paradox: A literature growing exponentially in spite of the fact that it keeps finding the same result. We draw upon the findings of 106 empirical studies, of which 32 appeared in the last 4 years, to examine whether development aid generates economic growth. The studies...

Directors’ pay and corporate governance continue to generate public outrage and calls for reform. Our meta-regression analysis of all comparable UK pay-for-performance estimates finds little, if any, meaningful association between directors’ pay and corporate performance. However, there is...

The aid allocation literature explores the motives behind development aid assistance. This literature is enormous, yet surprisingly, the extant empirical studies have in the main only focused on the motives of established donors. Consequently, relatively little is known of the motives of new...