Replication data for: Income and Democracy

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Daron Acemoglu; Simon Johnson; James A. Robinson; Pierre Yared

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
AER-Readme-File.doc	application/msword	34.5 KB	10/12/2019 04:25:AM
Income-and-Democracy-Data-AER-adjustment.xls	application/vnd.ms-excel	2.4 MB	10/12/2019 04:25:AM
LICENSE.txt	text/plain	14.6 KB	10/12/2019 04:25:AM

Project Citation:

Acemoglu, Daron, Johnson, Simon, Robinson, James A., and Yared, Pierre. Replication data for: Income and Democracy. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2008. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2019-10-12. https://doi.org/10.3886/E113251V1

Project Description

Summary: Existing studies establish a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy but do not control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables. We show that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the statistical association between income per capita and various measures of democracy. We present instrumental-variables estimates that also show no causal effect of income on democracy. The cross-country correlation between income and democracy reflects a positive correlation between changes in income and democracy over the past 500 years. This pattern is consistent with the idea that societies embarked on divergent political-economic development paths at certain critical junctures.

Scope of Project

JEL Classification:
D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
O47 Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence

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Published Versions

V1 [2019-10-12]

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DDI 2.5

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