Democratization as a cost-saving device

We propose a theoretical analysis of democratization processes in which an elite extends the franchise to the poor when threatened with a revo- lution. The poor could govern without changing the political system by maintaining a continuous revolutionary threat on the elite. Revolutionary threats, however, are costly to the poor and democracy is a superior sys- tem in which political agreement is reached through costless voting. This provides a rationale for democratic transitions that has not been discussed in the literature

A proper farewell to Kuznets' hypothesi

The aim of this paper is to o¤er a more appropriate test of Kuznets inverted-Uhypothesis than the one routinely used in the literature and implement it using panel and country-by-country regressions. We explore whether countries experiencing large shifts in population from the agri- cultural/rural sector to the urban one are characterized by an evolution of income inequality along the lines discussed by Simon Kuznets in its classical article. Our results show that there is no systematic relationship between income inequality and agricultural employment or rural population.

Institutions and economic development: panel evidence

In this paper we search for empirical support for the thesis that institutions are a major driver of economic development. While most of the literature uses cross-country regressions (and thus limits itself to the between-country variation in the data), this paper uses pooled OLS, panel regressions with fixed effects, and country by country re- gressions taking advantage of both the within- and between-country variation in the data. Results can be summarized as follows: (a) When using both the within- and between-country variation we find a limited effect of institutions on economic development. The effect disappears once countries leave the lowest level of institutional quality. (b) When using only the within-country variation we find no effect of institutions on economic development.

Colonialism, European descendants and democracy

This paper advances that the share of European descendants in the population is a major determinant of democracy in former colo- nial countries. We test this hypothesis using cross-section and panel regressions with 60 developing and developed countries that were once colonies. We …nd that the share of European descendants can explain more than half of the di¤erence in measures of democracy between the least and the most democratic countries in our sample. We control for other potential determinants of democracy and test for endogeneity bias using instrumental variables.democracy, European descendants, colonialism.

Is there a role for genetics in economic development?

Spolaore and Wacziarg (2009) have presented evidence supporting a role of genetic distance to the United States as a barrier to economic development. We extend their empirical work by controlling for the share of Europeans and European descendants in the population. We find that the role of genetic distance disappears and o¤er two alternative interpretations of the patterns in the data.Genetics; economic development; European settlement.

Adaption and anticipation effects to life events in the United Kingdom

We analyze how individual happiness is affected by nine major life events using a panel of British individuals. Our aim is to test the importance of hedonic adaptation in the United Kingdom and to compare our results with equivalent ones obtained in the literature using German data. We also study anticipation effects for each life event. We find evidence that adaptation, although a common phenomenon, is not always complete and in some cases may not even be present. Compared to German individuals, the British appear to adapt much less to marriage and much more to unemployment.

Demographic Transitions: analyzing the effects of mortality on fertility

The effect of mortality reductions on fertility is one of the main mech- anisms stressed by the recent growth literature in order to explain demo- graphic transitions. We analyze the empirical relevance of this mechanism based on the experience of all countries since 1960. We distinguish be- tween the e¤ects on gross and net fertility, take into account the dynamic nature of the relationship and control for alternative explanatory factors and for endogeneity. Our results show that mortality plays a large role in fertility reductions, that the change in fertility behavior comes with a lag of about 10 years and that both net and gross fertility are a¤ected. We find comparatively little support for explanations of the demographic transition based on economic development or technological change.mortality, fertility, demographic transitions, unified growth models.

GDP per capita or Real Wages? Making sense of coflicting views on pre-industrial Europe

This paper studies the apparent inconsistency between the evolution of GDP per capita and real wages in pre-industrial Europe. We show that these two measures will diverge when any of the three following factors are present: changes in income distribution, changes in labour supply per capita and changes in relative prices. We propose a methodology for measuring the e¤ects of these three factors and apply it to the case of 18th century England. For this particular episode the gap between the growth of GDP per capita and real wages can be successfully explained and the main explanatory factor is changes in labour supply per capita. Some further conclusions are drawn from the experience of England during the 19th century and Europe during the early modern period.

Monetary Policy and the Stock Market: Some International evidence

This paper presents a model where opening the capital account of an economy causes more bankruptcies to take place in the non tradables sector. Non tradable arms must forecast the future state of the economy when investing since the demand for their goods depends on this. In our model the interest rate is a powerful signal that non tradable arms use when the capital account is closed, but its informational content decreases once the capital account opens up and international (as well as domestic) shocks affect it.