The Impact of Data Revisions on the Robustness of Growth Determinants - A Note on 'Determinants of Economic Growth. Will Data Tell?'

Ciccone and Jarocinski (2010) show that inference in Bayesian model averaging (BMA) can be highly sensitive to small changes in the dependent variable. In particular they demonstrate that the importance of growth determinants in explaining growth varies tremendously over different revisions of Penn World Table (PWT) income data. They conclude that ’agnostic’ priors appear too sensible for this strand of growth empirics. In response, we show that the instability found owes much to a specific BMA set-up: the variation in results can be considerably reduced by applying an evenly ’agnostic’, but flexible prior.