Democracy Does Cause Growth: Comment

Markus Eberhardt

No 13659, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: I revisit the causal relationship between democracy and growth as recently studied in Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo, and Robinson (2019, ANRR). I demonstrate the sensitivity of their results to sample selection by dropping a small number of observations in a non-random fashion and use these findings to motivate a generalisation of their empirical approach. My own analysis relaxes the assumption of (i) a common democracy-growth relationship, and of (ii) the absence of strong cross-section correlation. Adopting novel methods for policy evaluation I find a robust positive long-run effect of democracy albeit with only around half the magnitude of that found in ANRR.

Keywords: Democracy; Growth; Political development; Spillovers; Difference-in-difference estimator; Interactive fixed effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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