In this paper, we study the extent to which the spread of democracy affects country-level health outcomes in 115 countries, between 1960 and 2015. To do this, we use both the level and change measures of democracy in our regressions, concentrating on within-country variations. Our finding is that a one standard deviation increase of 0.35 in the level of democracy is associated with a 0.11 standard deviation increase in life expectancy, even after accounting for various country and time features. This corresponds to an increase in life expectancy of around 5 years for a country initially, with a mean life expectancy of 54 years. However, we do not find the change measure of democracy to be consistently influential. These results are robust to employing alternative model specifications, to using different subsamples of the data, and to alternative estimation techniques. We also find that these critical effects are retained when using other measures of health status. In particular, we observe that as the level of democracy rises, each of infant mortality, child mortality, and crude death decreases. We, therefore, conclude that the material role of democratic institutions in fostering population health is of first-order relevance.

No abstract

No abstract

We examine the impact of sector-based reform on income inequality, concentrating on state banking deregulation in the US, for which we employ annual balanced panel data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, covering the period from 1970 to 2000, for our baseline analysis. The estimation strategy exploits the variation across states and years in the enactment of laws that remove restrictions on in-state bank branch geographical expansion and cross-state bank business operational expansion to compute the effects of developments in the financial sector on income inequality. We find evidence that inequality on average decreases with withinstate branching reform, whereas it on average increases with between-state banking deregulation. Utilising five different measures of inequality (top decile income share, Atkinson index, the Gini coefficient, relative mean deviation, and Theil entropy index), we determine that our finding materially depends on which measure of income inequality is being considered. We argue that this has not been stressed in the previous literature.

No abstract