Income and Democracy

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, Pierre Yared. 2008

1,601 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 vari- ous measures of democracy. We present instrumental-variables estimates that also show no causal effect of income on democracy. The cross-country corre - lation between income and democracy reflects a positive correlation between changes in income and democracy over the past 500 years. This pattern is con - sistent with the idea that societies embarked on divergent political-economic development paths at certain critical junctures. (JEL D7�, E�1)

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b43f23c250c2ac0976acae0df08b08363f5b6a4

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Citations in the corpus

Democracy, Development, and the International System (2011, methodology): “In line with Acemoglu et al. (2008), I calculate trade-shares during the postwar period using IMF data on trade-shares between 1980 and 1989. I also calculate separate tradeshares for the period before 1940 with data collected by Oneal and Russett (1999) on export dyads for the period 1900–1930.”
Do Natural Resources Fuel Authoritarianism? A Reappraisal of the Resource Curse (2011, neutral): “Moreover, these persistent, unspecified differences define the possible set of political institutions, and the possible set of economic sectors, that emerge and survive (Acemoglu et al. 2008).”
The validity of instruments revisited (2012, background): “We also show that subsampling will not achieve this.”
Government Expenditure, Governance and Economic Growth (2009, background): “The studies of Acemoglu et al. (2008), Barro”
Testing the neocon agenda: Democracy in resource-rich societies (2009, background): “Indeed, in their more recent work they argue that democracy is the outcome of a long institutional trajectory, rather than being generated by economic development (Acemoglu et al. 2008).”
The curse of aid (2008, neutral): “The third column of table 6 analyzes the effect of including two variables considered in Barro (1999) and used by Acemoglu et al (2007): years of primary education and the gap between male and female primary schooling. The coefficient estimate for aid is still negative, while the new explanatory var”