The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development, controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital, investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over a wide range of...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a “red herring” once one corrects for endogeneity of resource exports and allows resource abundance affect growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer significant while the value of...

Are natural resources a “curse” or a “blessing”? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a...

In this paper we re-evaluate the hypothesis that the development of the financial sector was an essential factor behind economic growth in 19th century Germany. We apply a structural VAR framework to a new annual data set from 1870 to 1912 that was initially recorded by Walther Hoffmann (1965)....

We estimate the steady state growth rate for the Nordic countries using a “knowledge economy” approach. An endogenous growth framework is employed, in which total factor productivity is a function of human capital (measured by average years of education), trade openness, research and...

This paper analyses the long-memory properties of a high-frequency financial time series dataset. It focuses on temporal aggregation and other features of the data, and how they might affect the degree of dependence of the series. Fractional integration or I(d) models are estimated with a...

In the first part of the paper we look at economic growth in Africa over the past three decades. We divide the past three decades into two parts: A "lost period" from 1981 to 1995 and a "recovery period" since the second half of the 1990s. During the first period, Africa did not catch up but...

We estimate a Factor Augmented Vector autoregression (FAVAR) to identify idiosyncratic exchange rate shocks and examine the effects of these shocks on different sectors of the economy. We find that an unexpected shock to the exchange rate has significant effects on the tradable sector of the...

How damaging are uncertainty shocks during extreme events such as the great recession and the Covid-19 outbreak? Can monetary policy limit output losses in such situations? We use a nonlinear VAR framework to document the large response of real activity to a financial uncertainty shock during...

How does the yield curve respond to a jump in financial uncertainty? We address this question by conducting a local projections analysis with US monthly data, period: 1962- 2018. The state-of-the-art financial uncertainty measure proposed by Ludvigson, Ma, and Ng (2019) is found to predict...