We present a new index of social unrest based on counts of relevant media reports. The index consists of individual monthly time series for 130 countries, available with almost no lag, and can be easily and transparently replicated. Spikes in the index identify major events, which correspond...

It is obvious that holding city population constant, differences in cities across the world are enormous. Urban giants in poor countries are not large using measures such as land area, interior space or value of output. These differences are easily reconciled mathematically as population is the...

Digital connectivity, including through the modern cellular network technologies, is expected to play a key role for the Future of Work in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We estimate the cost of introducing a full-scale 4G network by 2025 in SSA and an operable 5G network by 2040. We adapt the costing...

This paper provides evidence of the causal impact of oil discoveries on development. Novel data on the drilling of 20,000 oil wells in Brazil allows us to exploit a quasi-experiment: Municipalities where oil was discovered constitute the treatment group, while municipalities with drilling but no...

This paper analyzes regional labor mobility in Finland using two complementary empirical approaches: a VAR proposed by Blanchard and Katz (1992) and a gravity model. The results point to a relatively limited regional labor mobility in Finland compared to the U.S. and to EU peers. The limited...

This paper studies the main factors that explain the low regional mobility in Spain, with a view to identifying policy options at the regional and central level to promote labor mobility. The empirical analysis finds that house prices, labor market conditions, and the pervasiveness of labor...

Blacks in the United States have a lower geographic mobility rates than whites even though they have several characteristics that are usually associated with high rates of mobility: high unemployment, low rate of home ownership, low marriage rate and settlement in areas where unemployment is...

We examine patterns of regional adjustments to shocks in the US during the past four decades. We find that the response of interstate migration to relative labor market conditions has decreased, while the role of the unemployment rate as absorber of regional shocks has increased. However, the...

This paper examines the growth experience of twenty states of India during the period 1961-91, using cross-sectional estimation and the analytical framework of the Solow-Swan neoclassical growth model. We find evidence of absolute convergence--initially-poor states did indeed grow faster than...