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27 Const. Pol. Econ. 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/constpe27 and id is 1 raw text is: Const Polit Econ (2016) 27:1-40
DOI 10.1007/s10602-015-9198-y                                        CrossMuk
> I  i  A  I  I  I '.
State provision of constitutional goods
Romain Espinosa'
Published online: 23 July 2015
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
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 size.
Keywords Constitutional rights - Constitutional economics - Government
expenditure - Government size - Endogenous constitutions
JEL E60- H50 - K10
1 Introduction
Recent developments in the Constitutional Political Economy literature have studied
the relationship between constitutional rules and state behavior. These works aimed
to assess the impact of constitutional provisions on economic outcomes. So far, two
sets of constitutional rules have received most of the attention, i.e., rules defining de
jure judicial independence (Feld and Voigt 2003; Hayo and Voigt 2007, 2013;
® Romain Espinosa
romain.espinosa@u-paris2.fr
CRED (TEPP), Universit6 Paris II Panth6on-Assas, 12 Place du Panth6on, 75005 Paris, France

I_ Springer

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