Recent research in international economics highlights the role of interdependencies of investment decisions and sales of multinational firms. Previous work focused on and provided evidence for aggregate flows or stocks of foreign direct investment, showing that interdependence declines in...

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...

Most evidence for the resource curse comes from cross-country growth regressions suffers from a bias originating from the high and ever-evolving volatility in commodity prices. This paper addresses these issues by providing new cross-country empirical evidence for the effect of resources in...

Gravity models of international trade have been frequently applied to estimate the impact of common (official or spoken) language on bilateral trade. This study provides a meta-analysis based on 701 language effects collected from 81 academic articles. On average, a common (official or spoken)...

Theoretical and empirical research in economics suggests that bilateral migration triggers bilateral trade through a number of channels. This paper assesses the functional form of the impact of migration on trade flows in a quasi-experimental setting. We provide evidence that the relationship is...

The relationship between the abundance of natural resources and socio-economic performance has been a main object of study in the economic development field since Adam Smith. Dominated by the verification of the so called curse of natural resource, the mainstream literature on the topic has been...

New macro empirical evidence is provided to assess the relative importance of object and idea gaps in explaining the world income distribution dynamics over a benchmark period 1960-1985. Results are then extended through 1995. Formal statistical hypothesis tests allow us to discriminate between...

We examine empirically the effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth. We find that natural resources have a negative impact on growth when considered in isolation, but a positive impact on growth when including in the analysis other variables such as corruption, investments,...

This paper investigates the robustness of determinants of economic growth in the presence of model uncertainty, parameter heterogeneity and outliers. The robust model averaging approach introduced in the paper uses a flexible and parsimonious mixture modeling that allows for fat-tailed errors...

This paper empirically analyzes the joint impact of democracy and press freedom on corruption. Based in the theoretical literature, we argue that both institutional features are complements rather than substitutes in controlling corruption. Our regressions are based on a cross section of 170...