We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader's ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime...

We look at a part of the spatial angle of economic growth. We introduce a new measure Spatial Population Concentration (SPC) that captures the weighted average population surrounding every person within a geographic area. The weights are a function of the distance between the person in question...

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...