We explore the question of how political institutions and particularly democracy affect economic growth. Although empirical evidence of a positive effect of democracy on economic performance in the aggregate is weak, we provide evidence that democracy influences productivity growth in different...

Gender Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey's optimal criterion by taxing less the more elastic labor supply of (married) women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous and primitive. But in this paper we also explore differences in gender...