We identify the timing of currency, banking crises and sudden stops in New Zealand from 1880 to 2008, and consider the extent to which empirical models can explain New Zealand's crisis history. We find that the cross country evidence on the determinants of crises fits New Zealand experience...

This paper uses international trade data to examine the effects of climate shocks on economic activity. We examine panel models relating the annual growth rate of a country's exports in a particular product category to the country's weather in that year. We find that a poor country being 1...

We test for changes in price behavior in the longest crude oil price series available (1861-2008). We find strong evidence for changes in persistence and in volatility of price across three well defined periods. We argue that historically, the real price of oil has tended to be highly persistent...

Miguel, Satyanath and Sergenti (2004) use rainfall variation as an instrument to show that economic growth is negatively related to civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. In the reduced form regression they find that higher rainfall is associated with less conflict. Ciccone (2010) claims that...

Microeconomic evidence indicates a very high frequency of price adjustment in low income countries (LICs), raising the question of whether LICs may be reasonably characterized as exhibiting monetary neutrality. To address this question, we analyze a cross-country panel dataset of 79 LICs over...

A widely held view is that openness to international trade leads to higher GDP volatility, as trade increases specialization and hence exposure to sector-specific shocks. We revisit the common wisdom and argue that when country-wide shocks are important, openness to international trade can lower...

A growing body of evidence suggests that uncertainty is counter cyclical, rising sharply in recessions and falling in booms. But what is the causal relationship between uncertainty and growth? To identify this we construct cross country panel data on stock market levels and volatility as proxies...