Suchergebnisse

I examine the relationship between democracy and the perceived risk of corruption in a panel of 130 countries. My panel model controls for country fixed effects and enables the estimation of a within-country relationship between democracy and corruption. My main finding is that democracy significantly reduces the risk of corruption, but only in countries where ethnic fractionalization is low. In strongly fractionalized countries a transition from autocracy to democracy does not significantly reduce corruption. One explanation for these findings is that the corruption-reducing effect of greater accountability of politicians under democracy is undermined by the common pool problem; fractionalization increases the severity of the common pool problem.

I estimate the effect that growth in countries' GDP per capita has on the growth rate of infrastructure. In order to extract exogenous variation in GDP per capita growth, I use the growth of the international oil price multiplied with countries' GDP shares of oil net-exports as an instrumental variable. My instrumental variables estimates show that, for both democracies and autocracies, GDP per capita growth has a significant positive effect on infrastructure growth. This effect is significantly smaller in anocracies-so much so that, in anocracies, GDP per capita growth has no significant effect on the growth rate of infrastructure.

This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter examines empirically the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth in the Least Developed Countries. Instrumental variables techniques are used to estimate the effect that economic growth has on foreign aid and to adjust for the reverse causal effect that growth has on aid when estimating the effect that aid has on growth. The second chapter examines the effects that fiscal expansions have on the unemployment rate. The chapter presents SVAR evidence for ten OECD countries and builds a DSGE model with a labor force participation choice and workers' heterogeneity to explain the empirical findings. The third chapter examines the effects that economic growth has on the support for extreme political platforms. The chapter provides a theoretical model in favor of growth effects (as opposed to level effects) on the support for extreme political parties, and investigates empirically the relationship between growth and extremist votes for 16 OECD countries. Esta tesis consiste en tres capítulos. El primer capítulo examina empíricamente la relación entre la ayuda exterior y crecimiento económico en los países menos adelantados. Técnicas de variables instrumentales se utilizan para estimar el efecto que el crecimiento económico tiene sobre la ayuda exterior y para ajustar el efecto de causalidad inversa que el crecimiento tiene en la ayuda al estimar el efecto que la ayuda tiene sobre el crecimiento. El segundo capítulo analiza los efectos que las expansiones fiscales tienen sobre la tasa de desempleo. El capítulo presenta pruebas SVAR para diez países de la OCDE y construye un modelo DSGE con una participación en la fuerza de trabajo y heterogeneidad de los trabajadores para explicar los resultados empíricos. El tercer capítulo analiza los efectos que el crecimiento económico tiene en el apoyo a las plataformas políticas extremas. El capítulo ofrece un modelo teórico a favor de los efectos del crecimiento (en contraposición a los efectos de nivel) con el ...

Military expenditures significantly affect the relationship between the risk of civil conflict outbreak and natural resources. We show that a significant positive effect of natural resource rents on the risk of civil conflict outbreak is limited to countries with low military expenditures. In countries with high military expenditures, there is no significant effect of natural resource rents on civil conflict onset. An important message is thus that a conflict resource curse is absent in countries with sufficiently large military expenditures.