Nauro F. Campos

Political Regimes and Economic Outcomes

Nauro F Campos’ recent research, which he plans to present at CESifo, is on the relationship between democracy and economic growth. In joint work with Fabrizio Coricelli and Marco Frigerio, he presents new evidence showing that the relationship from political to economic development is causal and U-shaped. Covering 162 countries over 1960–2018, they show that “intermediate” political regimes lead to significantly inferior economic outcomes vis-à-vis both “democracies” and “autocracies.” Their baseline results suggest “intermediate” regimes decrease long-run GDP per capita by about 20 percent. These effects seem driven by political instability and productivity, while other potential mechanisms, such as education and investment, lack comparable empirical support. These findings are robust to, among others, using night-lights instead of GDP, different democracy measures and estimators (including dynamic panel and instrumental variables).

Mr. Campos’ main fields of interest are political economy and European integration. Works in progress include: The Synchronization of Business Cycles in the Euro Area; State Capacity and the Dynamics of Civil Wars; Foreign Direct Investment and Labor Market Reforms; and Labor Market Reforms in Hungary from 1986 to 2016: How and When did they Reduce the Gender Wage Gap?

Nauro F. Campos is Professor of Economics at University College London and Director of the UCL Centre for Comparative Economics. He has previously taught at CERGE-EI (Prague), California (Fullerton), Newcastle, Brunel, Bonn, Paris 1 Sorbonne and Warwick. He was a visiting Fulbright Fellow at Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), a Robert McNamara Fellow at The World Bank, and a CBS Fellow at Oxford. He is currently a Research Fellow at IZA, a Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT (Maastricht University), a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the (Central) Bank of Finland, and a Senior Fellow of the ESRC Peer Review College. He is the editor-in-chief of Comparative Economic Studies (journal of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies) and of Cambridge University Press' series Elements of Economics of European Integration.