Should procedural barriers to constitutional amendment be more onerous than those to the policy changes of ordinary politics? – i.e., should constitutions be entrenched? One criterion by which to evaluate these questions is economic performance. Using data on countries worldwide and constitutional adoptions from 1973 to 2017, we estimate the effect of constitutional entrenchment (rigidity) on economic growth. We employ matching methods to make causal inferences. The adoption of a constitution that is meaningfully more rigid than its predecessor defines a treatment. In our benchmark estimations (based on 19 treatments), post-treatment effects on growth are generally small and statistically insignificant. However, when we examine a subsample that excludes autocracies (13 treatments), post-treatment effects are always negative and sometimes statistically significant. The same is true when we exclude treatments associated with coups (12 treatments). Contrary to many scholars’ priors, the evidence suggests that, if anything (and based on the limited number of available treatments), greater entrenchment causes less economic growth.

修宪的程序障碍是否应该比普通政治的政策变化更难？– 即，宪法是否应该根深蒂固? 评估这些问题的一项标准是经济表现。我们使用 1973 年至 2017 年世界各国和宪法采纳的数据，估计宪法巩固（刚性）对经济增长的影响。我们采用匹配方法进行因果推断。采用比其前身更严格的宪法定义了一种待遇。在我们的基准估计中（基于 19 种处理），处理后对生长的影响通常很小，并且在统计上不显着。然而，当我们检查排除独裁（13 次处理）的子样本时，处理后的影响总是负面的，有时具有统计学意义。当我们排除与政变相关的治疗时也是如此（12 次治疗）。与许多学者的先验相反，证据表明，