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Cited by 690

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth Since World War II

Jones, B. F., Olken, B. A.·2005·The Quarterly Journal of Economics

Abstract

Economic growth within countries varies sharply across decades. This paper examines one explanation for these sustained shifts in growth—changes in the national leader. We use deaths of leaders while in office as a source of exogenous variation in leadership, and ask whether these plausibly exogenous leadership transitions are associated with shifts in country growth rates. We find robust evidence that leaders matter for growth. The results suggest that the effects of individual leaders are strongest in autocratic settings where there are fewer constraints on a leader's power. Leaders also appear to affect policy outcomes, particularly monetary policy. The results suggest that individual leaders can play crucial roles in shaping the growth of nations.

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Metadata

Authors
Jones, B. F., & Olken, B. A.
Venue
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Published
2005-08-01
Volume
120
Issue
3
Pages
835-864
ISSN
  • 0033-5533 (ISSN-L)
  • 1531-4650
OpenAlex
W3124164738
Cited by
690
References
7
FWCI
52.51
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth Since World War II. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1093/qje/120.3.835
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Jones, B. F., & Olken, B. A. (2005). Do Leaders Matter? National Leadership and Growth Since World War II. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/120.3.835

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.