Empirical Constitutional Economics: Onward and Upward?

Abstract

Empirical constitutional economics has made a huge leap forward over the last decade. Interesting insights into the effects of constitutions have been discovered. The next logical step in this field is to endogenize constitutions. Thus, rather than summarizing the state of the art, this paper identifies some of the current shortcomings and proposes a number of extensions. In particular, it calls for recognizing additional constitutional institutions as explanatory variables, as well as the incorporation of additional dependent variables.