Inequality between ethnic groups has been shown to be negatively related to GDP, but research on its effect on contemporary economic growth is limited by the availability of comparable data. We compile a novel and comprehensive dataset of harmonized Gini indices on ethnic inequality for...

Does the financial sector contribute to economic growth? While most of the studies carried out before the Financial crisis tend to answer the question with 'yes', recent empirical work provides evidence that the opposite is true. We study these new findings in detail, applying GMM and 3SLS...

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy, which enables a very detailed and sensitive index. This method is based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. Our implementation evaluates 188 countries in the period between 1981 and 2011. The Support...

Evidence from a novel measure of democracy (SVMDI) based on Support Vector Machines highlights a robust positive relationship between democracy and economic growth. We argue that the ambiguity in recent studies can be traced back to the neglect of the information in the equation in levels and...

This paper investigates the major drivers of governmental redistribution. We retest the Meltzer-Richard hypothesis and account for a plethora of political, institutional, and cultural forces that influence the scope of redistribution. Extended and harmonized data on effective redistribution...

Evidence from a current panel of harmonized worldwide data highlights a robust negative effect of income inequality on economic growth that we trace back to its transmission channels. Less equal societies tend to have less educated populations and higher fertility rates, but not necessarily...

This paper investigates the causes of the "vanishing effect of finance" detected in recent studies. The results highlight that the negative effect of the financial system on growth is mainly driven by advanced economies, whereas finance is still beneficial for income increases in developing...

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. The Support Vector Machines Democracy Index (SVMDI) is continuously on the 0-1-interval and enables a very detailed measurement of democracy for 188 countries...

We compile data for 186 countries (1919 - 2016) and apply different aggregation methods to create new democracy indices. We observe that most of the available aggregation techniques produce indices that are often too favorable for autocratic regimes and too unfavorable for democratic regimes....

Scholars have been active in investigating causes and consequences of austerity policies. We examine how economists use the term “austerity” in scientific studies and measure austerity in empirical analyses. The sample includes around 3,500 journal articles published in the top 400 journals...