Replication Package for: "Institutional Thresholds and the Activation of Human Capital: A Theory of Regime-Contingent Growth in Developing Economies"

This replication package contains all data, code, and documentation required to reproduce the empirical results in Botsyoe (2025), "Institutional Thresholds and the Activation of Human Capital: A Theory of Regime-Contingent Growth in Developing Economies."

The paper develops the Institutionally-Mediated Threshold Activation (IMTA) framework — an overlapping-generations model in which institutional quality governs the minimum public education expenditure required to activate the Lucas–Romer human capital growth mechanism — and validates four theoretical propositions using Hansen's (1999) fixed-effects panel threshold regression (PTR) across 115 developing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (47), Asia (38), and Latin America (30) over 1970–2023.

Contents: Stata do-files (00–07), master panel dataset and three regional subsamples (WDI/WGI/UNESCO sources), variable construction notes, and a README with full replication instructions.

Key results: Full-sample thresholds of 3.14% (SSA), 4.03% (Asia), and 6.96% (Latin America) of GDP confirm the cross-regional ordering predicted by the IMTA framework. Stability-stratified sub-group estimates with non-overlapping confidence intervals confirm institutional compression of the activation threshold (∂γ*(ι)/∂ι < 0). Causal identification uses FE–IV (Cragg–Donald F = 950.2 for Latin America, 66.9 for Asia) and System GMM with collapsed instruments.

Software: Stata 16 or later. Required packages: xthreg, xtabond2, xtivreg2.

Data sources: World Bank World Development Indicators (WDI), Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS).