Poor countries are more volatile than rich countries, and we know this volatility impedes their growth. We also know … that commodity price volatility is a key source of those shocks. This paper explores commodity and manufactures prices over … the past three centuries to answer three questions: Has commodity price volatility increased over time? The answer is no …

lower the volatility of output growth. Technological complexity evolves endogenously in response to profit incentives. The … decline in volatility thus arises as a by-product of firms' incentives to increase profits and is hence a likely outcome of … that for reasonable parameter values, the model can generate a decline in volatility with the level of development …

volatility into these four sources, quantify their contribution to aggregate volatility, and study how they relate to the stage …, and slowly increases at later stages of development. Third, the volatility of country- specific macroeconomic shocks falls … with the level of development. We argue that many theories linking volatility and development are not consistent with these …