No Country for Old Men: Aging Dictators and Economic Growth

Richard Jong-A-Pin () and Jochen Mierau

No 11-039, Working Papers CEB from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: This paper develops a model of the relationship between the age of a dictator and economic growth. In the model a dictator must spread the resources of the economy over his reign but faces mortality and political risk. The model shows that if the time horizon of the dictator decreases, either due to an increase of mortality risk or political risk, the economic growth rate decreases. The model predictions are supported by empirical evidence based on a threeway fixed effects model including country, year and dictator fixed effects for a sample of dictators from 116 countries. These results are robust to sample selection, the tenure of dictators, the definition of dictatorship, and a broad set of economic growth determinants.

Keywords: Aging, ,; economic growth; government performance; political instability; political leaders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 O11 O43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 p.
Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cwa, nep-dev, nep-fdg and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published by:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/97265/5/wp11039.pdf wp11039 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: No country for old men: Aging dictators and economic growth (2022)
Working Paper: No Country for Old Men: Aging Dictators and Economic Growth (2011)
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:sol:wpaper:2013/97265

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... ulb.ac.be:2013/97265

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers CEB from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().