This paper examines the robustness of explanatory variables in cross-country economic growth regressions. It employs a novel approach, Bayesian Averaging of Classical Estimates ¤ (BACE), which constructs estimates as a weighted average of OLS estimates for every possible combination of included...

Concerns about the quality of China's official GDP statistics have been a perennial question in understanding its economic dynamics. We use data on satellite-recorded nighttime lights as an independent benchmark for comparing various published indicators of the state of the Chinese economy....

This paper questions current empirical practice in the study of growth. We argue that much of the modern empirical growth literature is based on assumptions concerning regressors, residuals, and parameters which are implausible both from the perspective of economic theory as well as from the...

The dismal growth performance of Africa is the worst economic tragedy of the XXth century. We document the evolution of per capita GDP for the continent as a whole and for subset of countries south of the Sahara desert. We document the worsening of various income inequality indexes and we...