Research Projects and Outputs

Working Paper

Assessing the Institutions-Innovation Channel within the Inequality-Growth Nexus (2023)

Under review. Click title to access.

This paper assesses the interactions between innovation and economic institutions within the context of the inequality-growth nexus. We show that the marginal effects of innovations on growth and inequality diminish as institutions increase in quality, and the effects of institutions can be influenced by level of innovations. More importantly, we note a series of transitory interactive effects on growth which show property right protection as the principal growth-enhancing institutions in earlier stages of development, and broader institutional quality in later stages. The growth effects gradually transfer to the latter as an economy develops.

Ongoing Projects

Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Impact on Contemporary African Militarism and Institutions (2024)

Recent studies show that significant historical events, particularly the slave trade, had an impact on contemporary African economies. The transmission mechanisms, however, are not well established. The purpose of the present paper is to consider two such transmission mechanisms, notably militarism and economic institutions. The present paper explores the impact of the historical slave trade on institutions in two ways. Firstly, its impact on contemporary militarism as a political institution and, secondly, its impact on economic institutions, in particular property rights enforcement. The analysis uniquely shows the causal link between an important aspect of the historical slave trade, notably the import of military arms, and current African institutions. Finally, we also show that contemporary militarism, especially in the affected African economies, has a direct impact on their incomes.

Production complete, awaiting journal submission

The Innovation-Institutions Effects: a Closer Look at the Interactions (2022)

Working Paper in Production

A Voter-driven Policy Model for the Inequality-Growth Trade-off (2023)

Working Paper in Production

Thesis

The Inequality-Growth Nexus:

A Study on Institutions, Innovation, and theTrade-off Between Inequality and Growth (2022)

The present research examines the effects of economic institutions under the broader context of the inequality-growth nexus. We are able to identify from fixed effects panel estimations that although both institutional quality and innovations can offer significant contributions towards economic growth, this progress is made at the expense of economic equality. The interactions of the two variables of interest are found to be negative in signs within the inequality and the growth model, meaning the marginal effects of both innovations and institutions on growth and inequality diminish in their potency as their interacting counterparts increase in value. This indicates that while institutions and innovations are shown to be inequality-inducing, their interaction dampens the effect at higher values. Similarly, while both variables contribute positively towards growth, their interactions also possess negative coefficients, reduces the overall impact on growth in a display of potential institutional inefficiency and diminishing return on innovation. Furthermore, we uncover a transitory institutional effect on growth, where the partial effects of property right protection gradually diminish as the economy develop and are eventually replaced by the broader institutional effects. Additional testing of the model uses GMM and IV estimations, as well as additional robustness tests, reinforce the findings. To develop policy implications from our hypotheses and the empirical findings, we construct a theoretical framework of a voter-driven political model where the balance of the inequality-growth trade-off is set by a redistributive policy tool, determined by a median voter through their utility consideration between inequality and economic growth. We estimate the structural model using the indirect inference technique on long data for the UK from 1870 to 2018. The empirical estimation is not rejected by the Wald test, suggesting that our theoretical model cannot be rejected and is a good fit for empirical data.

Click title for access.