Institutions, Education, and Economic Performance

This paper considers the interactions between governance, educational outcomes, and economic performance. More specifically, we seek to establish the linkages by which institutional quality affect growth by considering its mediating impact on education. While the contribution of both human capital and institutions to growth are often acknowledged, the channels by which institutions affect human capital and, in turn, growth, has been relatively underexplored. Our empirical approach adopts a two-stage strategy that estimates national-level educational production functions which include institutional governance as a covariate, and uses these estimates as instruments for human capital in cross-country growth regressions.