Reply to “A Replication Study of ‘Openness, Country Size, and Government Size’ (Journal of Public Economics2009)”

Andrew Musau is able to replicate almost exactly Ram’s estimates from Penn World Table 6.1. Like Ram, Musau is also unable to show a significant negative association between country size and openness and between country size and government size of the kind postulated by Alesina and Wacziarg. To shed further light on the issue, fixed-effects estimates of the three core regressions are obtained from the widely used World Bank data for 174...