How substantial are the economic benefits from democratic regime change? We argue that democratisation is often not a discrete event but a two-stage process: autocracies enter into ‘episodes’ of political liberalisation which eventually culminate in regime change or not. To account for this chronology and the implicit counterfactual groups, we introduce a repeated-treatment difference-in-difference implementation capturing non-parallel trends and selection into treatment. We find that modelling regime change in two stages rather than a single event yields stronger long-run growth effects. Among democratizers, experiencing repeated episodes without regime change reduces growth in democracy whereas length of episode does not.

A large body of literature estimates private returns to R&D adopting the Griliches knowledge production framework, which ignores the potential impact of spillovers on consistent estimation. Using a panel of twelve manufacturing industries across ten OECD economies, we investigate whether ignoring spillovers leads to bias in the estimated private returns to R&D. We compare results from a common factor framework, which accounts for spillovers and other unobserved shocks, to those from a standard Griliches approach. Our findings confirm that conventional estimates conflate own-R&D and spillover effects, implying that spillovers cannot be ignored even when the interest lies exclusively in evaluating private returns to R&D.