This paper shows that greater global spatial correlation of productivities can increase cross-country welfare dispersion by increasing the correlation between a country's productivity and its gains from trade. We causally validate this prediction using a global climatic phenomenon as a natural...

Empirical analyses of climatic event impacts on growth, while critical for policy, have been slow to be incorporated into macroeconomic climate-economy models. This paper proposes a joint empirical-structural approach to bridge this gap for tropical cyclones. First, we review competing empirical...