Both sides of the institutions and growth debate have resorted largely to microeconometric techniques in testing hypotheses. In this paper, I build a panel structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model for a short panel of 119 countries over 10 years and find support for the institutions hypothesis. Controlling for individual fixed effects, I find that exogenous shocks to a proxy for institutio...

No past studies of diarrhea in children of the Middle East have examined in detail the phenotypes of enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) strains, which are important pathogens in this setting. During a prospective study conducted from November 1993 to September 1995 with 242 children under 3 years of age with diarrhea living near Alexandria, Egypt, 125 episodes of diarrhea were positive for...

Trustworthiness is the foundation for trust, institutions, and per capita output in society. Trustworthiness is primary – a society’s willingness to trust and the quality of its institutions have their origins in the trustworthiness of its citizens. Trustworthiness is therefore the basis for maximizing output in economic exchange and in explaining differences in standards of living around the w...

Institutions affect the process of economic growth through their many indicators. The authors have checked the relationship between institutions and economic growth in selected countries of South Asia by using data from 1995 to 2010. The results of ‘Fixed Effects Estimation’ and ‘Generalize Method of Moments’ confirmed the significant positive relationship between institutions and economic grow...

Fixed-term contract employment has increasingly replaced regular open-ended employment as the predominant form of employment notably in developing countries. Guided by factory-level evidence showing nuanced patterns of co-movements of regular and contract wages, we propose a two-tiered task based model with self-enforcing contracts in which firms allocate complex tasks to long term employees at...

We construct an endogenous growth model and we employ empirical analysis to investigate the link between foreign aid and production inefficiency in the presence of different political orientations in the recipient country. Using a panel of 124 countries from 1971 to 2007 and the production frontier toolbox, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, time horizons, the sources of aid, and the tim...

This paper discusses a number of questions with regard to Sweden’s economic and political development: • How did Sweden become rich? • What explains Sweden’s high level of income equality? • What were the causes of Sweden’s problems from 1970 to 1995? • How is it possible that Sweden, since the crisis of the early 1990s, is growing faster than most EU countries despite its high taxes and genero...

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major effects on macroeconomic quantities but are absent from conventional models. We discuss and compare the us...