Constitutions and Economic Development: Evidence from the American Indian Nations This paper presents an empirical examination of economic and institutional development. Utilizing a novel data set on American Indian tribal nations, we investigate how constitutional design affects economic development, while holding the broader legal and political environment fixed. Instrumental variables regres...

It is the charge of economic history not only to explain the economic past, but to use it to enrich and develop economic theory (North, 1994). In paleoeconomics, theory plays the additional role of adding veracity of accounts based on sparse evidence through the demonstration of internal consistency. We synthesize pre-historical and historical evidence available from the settlement and moderniz...

When it comes to the inequality-growth relationship, the empirical literature offers contradictory assessments: Estimators based on time-series variation only (i.e., differencesbased estimators) indicate a strong positive link while estimators also exploiting the crosssectional variation (i.e., level-based estimators) suggest a negative relationship. Taking advantage of a new dataset, the prese...

The “middle-income trap” is the phenomenon of hitherto rapidly growing economies stagnating at middle-income levels and failing to graduate into the ranks of high-income countries. In this study we examine the middle-income trap as a special case of growth slowdowns, which are identified as large sudden and sustained deviations from the growth path predicted by a basic conditional convergence f...

I consider an environment in which contract enforcement is a decision variable for the principal. I construct a model in which entrepreneurs cannot commit to repaying investors for the capital advanced, but investors can force repayment by spending resources. The principal uses enforcement to reduce the resources available to the agent after a default, thus providing incentives for the agent to...

Macro-level estimates of the productivity of public capital are typically larger than microlevel estimates. The evidence also shows large cross-country differences in the quality of public capital. A general equilibrium growth model is introduced to explain both facts. The productivity of firms specializing in differentiated intermediate inputs depends on public capital whose provision is subje...

A large literature suggests that countries with better governance have higher growth rates. We explore whether this is also true at the sub-national level in Indonesia. We exploit a new dataset of firm perceptions of the quality of economic governance in 243 districts across Indonesia to estimate the impact of nine different dimensions of governance on district growth. Surprisingly, we find rel...

We construct a variant of the neoclassical model with endogenous entry and operation decisions by …rms. The model is calibrated to match key features of the distribution of …rms, by age and by size, for the U.S. A higher entry cost leads to a higher degree of misallocation of productive factors across …rms, lower TFP, and lower output. In the data entry costs average 58 percent of per capita GD...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders’ expectations based on publicly available information rather than true income, resulting in an observed income and payout process that adjust...

This paper uses an institutional approach to investigate the relationship between the regional institutional environment and regional new firm formation. The importance of perceived attitudes regarding private enterprises, local taxes, political majority, the size of the government sector and perceived rules and bureaucracy on new firm formation in 286 Swedish municipalities are investigated. T...