Steve Kim
Working Papers
Does Democracy Build State Capacity?
The existence of a state capable of providing public goods necessary for economic growth cannot be taken for granted. Hence, state capacity growth is a necessary step towards long run economic growth for many low-income and middle-income economies today. While some argue that narrow political representation is optimal for building state capacity, which subsequently enables economic growth, some point to a broad distribution of political power as key to long run state and economic growth. This paper develops a framework that integrates the two arguments and finds that the optimal breadth of political representation for state capacity growth widens at later stages of state capacity growth.
Political Basis of Technological Change
What type of political regime best spurs technological change? Technological change has long been recognized as central to economic growth. More recently, political institutions have received great attention as a major determinant of economic development. However, the causal chain from regime type to technological change has received scant scholarly attention. One open question is whether the causal chain interacts with the economy’s distance to the world technology frontier. By constructing a model where the politics has microfoundations and technology is endogenous, this paper characterizes the effect of regime type on technological change in an economy at various distances to the technology frontier.