ABSTRACT Synthesizing 1052 estimates extracted from 116 studies, this paper examines whether corruption control impacts economic growth and whether the effect differs across regions. Using heterogeneity‐robust synthesis methods, we find evidence that corruption control promotes economic growth both globally and at the regional level. Although publication selection bias is present in the literature, bias‐corrected effect sizes remain positive and statistically significant, indicating a genuine growth‐enhancing effect. Meta‐regression analysis further reveals significant regional heterogeneity: The growth effect of corruption control is significantly stronger in Asia and Latin America than in Europe and the Middle East and Africa, even after controlling for study characteristics. Our findings support the “sand the wheels” hypothesis and imply that corruption reflects institutional failure rather than a functional informal institution.
ABSTRACT Using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V‐Dem) project and the NAVCO catalog (1950–2019), we estimate the developmental effects of successful revolutions through difference‐in‐differences models and event studies. Our findings differ from common expectations: neither violent nor nonviolent revolutions consistently deliver expected development benefits. Educational indicators remain largely unchanged across both types of revolutions, and both violent and nonviolent movements are associated with lower GDP per capita. Baseline effects on life expectancy are not distinguishable from zero, though some dynamic specifications suggest positive effects for nonviolent revolutions. Our results show that while revolutions may secure political and social gains, the economic costs are large, which raises questions about whether the benefits of revolution justify these development costs.
This paper analyzes the relationship between political connections and firms' financing decisions in Brazil using large datasets on campaign contributions, loans from the Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econ & ocirc;mico e Social (BNDES), and financial variables from Capital IQ. First, the results confirm those of previous studies showing that politically connected firms gain preferential access to finance. The present paper extends these studies by demonstrating that this access is even stronger when firms contribute to more than one party (hedging hypothesis) and are frequent contributors. Second, the present paper provides novel evidence by showing that politically connected firms issue less net equity and net debt (excluding subsidized loans from the Brazilian Development Bank, BNDES) than similar nonconnected firms, suggesting that the former firms avoid raising external resources from capital markets.
Survey responses to environmental policy instruments may capture perceived behavioral effectiveness rather than abstract normative approval. This paper examines how environmental concern and information channels are associated with the selection of fines and incentives as measures that could encourage more frequent separate waste collection. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) Aspects of Daily Life survey for 2017-2022, we distinguish between global/collective-oriented concern and local/proximate concern and between one-way media information and interpersonal information. The two outcomes are nonexclusive selections within a multiple-response survey battery. We estimate a bivariate probit model for the two binary outcomes and complement it with a multinomial specification that exploits the multiple-response structure of the survey item. The results show that both global/collective-oriented concern and local/proximate concern are positively associated with the endorsement of the two instruments, but global/collective-oriented concern is consistently the stronger correlate. These outcomes concern perceived effectiveness within the survey context and should not be interpreted as direct measures of political approval or policy legitimacy.
This study investigates the relationship between urban inequality and gambling on a distinct dataset that encompasses administrative records of gambling turnover by game type in Italian municipalities. We find a substantive impact of urban inequality on gambling turnover, using ordinary least squares estimates that control directly for poverty; we interpret the relationship causally under a selection-on-observables argument bounded by an Oster (2019) coefficient-stability test and corroborate its sign and relevance, though not its magnitude, with a shift-share instrumental-variable strategy. Moreover, we show that the impact of inequality is additional and larger than that of poverty. Finally, inequality promotes gambling particularly in less well-off Southern municipalities, especially concerning turnover generated from games closely associated with gambling-related issues. Given the documented regressive nature of gambling taxation, our results are consistent with a self-reinforcing dynamic between urban inequality and gambling, whereby rising inequality stimulates gambling demand among disadvantaged households whose gambling expenditures, taxed regressively, may in turn widen the income distribution further-a mechanism we flag as an important avenue for future research.
