Income and Democracy: A Smooth Varying Coefficient Redux

Alexander L. Lundberg, Kim P. Huynh, David T. Jacho-Chávez*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Acemoglu et al. (American Economic Review 2008; 98: 808–842) find no effect of income on democracy when controlling for fixed effects in a dynamic panel model. Work by Moral-Benito and Bartolucci (Economics Letters 2012; 117: 844–847) and Cervellati et al. (American Economic Review 2014; 104: 707–719) suggests that the original model might have been misspecified and proposes alternative specifications instead. We formally test these parametric specifications by implementing Lee's (Journal of Econometrics 2014; 178: 146–166) dynamic panel test of linear parametric specifications against a general class of nonlinear alternatives robustly and reject all these specifications. However, using a more flexible model proposed by Cai and Li (Econometric Theory 2008; 24: 1321–1342) we find that the relationship between income and democracy appears to be mediated by education, but results are not statistically significant.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)719-724
Number of pages6
JournalJournal of Applied Econometrics
Volume32
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 1 2017

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
  • Economics and Econometrics

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