State provision of constitutional goods

Authors: Romain Espinosa

Publish Date: 2015/07/23

Volume: 27, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-40

PDF Link

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of constitutional rights on the level of public expenditure in a large sample of countries To do so we construct a panel of 73 countries from 1960 to 2011 We first investigate factors that drive constitutional changes regarding constitutional rights To address potential endogeneity concerns in the choice of constitutional rules we rely on an instrumental variable within estimation country and time fixed effects to estimate the impact of constitutional rights on government size We find that larger governments tend to inscribe fewer rights in their constitutions but we do not detect any impact of constitutional rights on the government sizeI wish to thank Stefan Voigt Tom Ginsburg Jerg Gutmann Bruno Deffains and two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper I am also indebted to Régis Blazy for his very detailed remarks at the ACDD days in Strasbourg I would like to express my deep gratitude to Jamal Greene and Sudhir Krishnaswamy for their very instructive classes during my stay at Columbia University that have greatly contributed to this work

Keywords: