Abstract
Constitutional (non-)compliance and its effects are increasingly analyzed in empirical studies. Gutmann et al. (2024) developed the Comparative Constitutional Compliance Database for 175 countries since 1900, while Lewczuk & Metelska-Szaniawska (2025) provided evidence of a positive relationship between constitutional compliance and GDP per capita using dynamic panel regressions. The latter study, however, fails to distinguish short- and long-run effects. In this paper, we construct a new set of indicators, inspired by Grier and Grier (2021), allowing us to capture the size and durability of changes in compliance, and revisit the question of economic consequences of respecting/violating constitutions using two matching-based approaches – linear regression adjustment (Acemoglu et al. 2019) and matching treated and untreated countries with similar compliance histories and covariates (Imai et al.2023). Our findings confirm and extend those of Lewczuk & Metelska-Szaniawska (2025), highlighting a new aspect – the long-run economic effects of respecting constitutions. We also contribute by enriching the available global database of constitutional (non-)compliance with a set of new indicators allowing to capture size and durability of changes, facilitating future work in this area.