Policy Volatility, Institutions, and Economic Growth
研究了93个国家的数据，发现政策波动性（政府支出频繁且大幅变动）对经济增长有显著的直接负面影响，面板回归中波动性每增加一个标准差，长期经济增长降低约0.74%。
In this paper, we present evidence that policy volatility exerts a strong and direct negative impact on growth. Using data for 93 countries, we construct measures of policy volatility based on the standard deviation of the residuals from country-specific regressions of government consumption on output. Undisciplined governments that implement frequent and large changes in government spending unrelated to the state of the business cycle generate lower economic growth. We employ both instrumental variables and panel estimation to address concerns of omitted variables and endogeneity. A 1 standard deviation increase in policy volatility reduces long-term economic growth by about 0.74% in the panel regressions and by more than 1 percentage point in the cross-section. © 2013 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.