Dani Rodrik

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instrumental variables for institutions and trade, and conclude that the quality of institutions "trumps" everything else.

TL;DR: This paper analyzed the relationship between economics and politics and concluded that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth-retarding policies, and presented cross-country evidence consistent with it. But their analysis focused on how an economy's initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution, and how that, in turn, affects long run growth.

TL;DR: This paper found little evidence that open trade policies are significantly associated with economic growth, in the sense of lower tariff and nontariff barriers to trade, and showed that the indicators of openness used by researchers are poor measures of trade barriers or are highly correlated with other sources of bad economic performance.

TL;DR: The authors showed that there is a robust empirical association between the extent to which an economy is exposed to trade and the size of its government sector, and that government consumption plays a risk-reducing role in economies exposed to a significant amount of external risk.

TL;DR: There exists a positive correlation between an economy's exposure to international trade and the size of its government as mentioned in this paper, and the correlation holds for most measures of government spending, in low and high income samples, and is robust to the inclusion of a wide range of controls.