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Journal ArticleDOI

Institutions and economic performance: cross‐country tests using alternative institutional measures

Stephen Knack, +1 more
- 01 Nov 1995 - 
- Vol. 7, Iss: 3, pp 207-227
TLDR
The authors compared more direct measures of the institutional environment with both the instability proxies used by Barro (1991) and the Gastil indices, by comparing their effects both on growth and private investment.
Abstract
This paper compares more direct measures of the institutional environment with both the instability proxies used by Barro (1991) and the Gastil indices, by comparing their effects both on growth and private investment. The results provide substantial support for the position that the institutional roots of growth and convergence are significant. The marked improvement that these new variables represent over existing proxies also suggests that there are substantial returns to future research into variables that reflect the security of property rights and the efficiency with which states determine economic policies and allocate public goods.

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Law and Finance

TL;DR: This paper examined legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries and found that common law countries generally have the best, and French civil law countries the worst, legal protections of investors.
Journal ArticleDOI

Law and Finance

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the quality of their enforcement in 49 countries and found that common-law countries generally have the strongest, and French civil law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors, with German- and Scandinavian-civil law countries located in the middle.
Journal ArticleDOI

Why Do Some Countries Produce so Much More Output Per Worker than Others

TL;DR: This paper showed that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker, and that a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries is driven by differences in institutions and government policies.
Journal ArticleDOI

Does Social Capital Have an Economic Payoff? A Cross-Country Investigation

TL;DR: In this article, the authors used indicators of trust and civic norms from the World Values Surveys for a sample of 29 market economies and found that membership in formal groups is not associated with trust or with improved economic performance.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation

TL;DR: Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson as discussed by the authors used estimates of potential European settler mortality as an instrument for institutional variation in former European colonies today, and they followed the lead of Curtin who compiled data on the death rates faced by European soldiers in various overseas postings.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth

TL;DR: The authors examined whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living, and they showed that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data.
ReportDOI

Economic Growth in a Cross Section of Countries

TL;DR: For 98 countries in the period 1960-1985, the growth rate of real per capita GDP is positively related to initial human capital (proxied by 1960 school-enrollment rates) and negatively related to the initial (1960) level as mentioned in this paper.
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A sensitivity analysis of cross-country growth regressions

TL;DR: In this article, the authors study whether the conclusions from existing studies are robust or fragile when small changes in the list of independent variables occur, and they find that although "policy"appears to be importantly related to growth, there is no strong independent relationship between growth and almost every existing policy indicator.
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A sensitivity analysis of cross-country growth regressions

TL;DR: The authors examined whether the conclusions from existing studies are robust or fragile to small changes in the conditioning information set and found a positive, robust correlation between growth and the share of investment in GDP and between investment share and the ratio of international trade to GDP.
Posted Content

The Penn World Table (Mark 5): An Expanded Set of International Comparisons, 1950-1987

TL;DR: The Penn World Table as discussed by the authors is a set of national accounts economic time series covering many countries and its expenditure entries are denominated in common set of prices in a common currency so that real quantity comparisons can be made, both between countries and over time.
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