Interest Groups and the "Rise and Decline" of Growth

Bonnie Wilson and Jac Heckelman

Working Papers from Saint Louis University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Interest groups are known to exert a sclerotic impact on mean growth, `a la Mancur Olson (1982). It is unknown, however, what (if any) impact groups exert on the volatility of growth - an important hindrance to development. In this paper, we first consider what impact we should expect Olson groups to have on the volatility of growth. We then estimate the relation between groups and growth volatility in a cross-country panel, using System GMM. The findings indicate that groups are associated with growth stability. In addition, the findings suggest that interest groups may be a source of the stability observed in democracies.

Keywords: special interest groups; volatility; democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 O43 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-08, Revised 2013-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in Southern Economic Journal, October 2014, pages 435 - 456

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.slu-econ-wp.com/RePEc/slu/bonnie_wilson/democ_vol_ab.pdf Revised version, 2012
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.slu-econ-wp.com:80 (No such host is known. )
http://www.slu-econ-wp.com/RePEc/slu/bonnie_wilson/democ_vol_ae.pdf Revised version, 2013
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.slu-econ-wp.com:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Interest Groups and the “Rise and Decline” of Growth (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:slu:wpaper:2012-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Saint Louis University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bonnie Wilson ().