Most studies of the economies of Eastern Europe by Western analysts depend substantially on Western data and Western attitudes. Usually this dependence is implicit and concealed. An explicit and transparent treatment may yield better results, both for the individual analyst and for the...

Recent empirical work in several economic fields, particularly environmental and energy economics, has adapted the regression discontinuity (RD) framework to applications where time is the running variable and treatment begins at a particular threshold in time. In this guide for practitioners,...

Using annual U. S. time series data from 1950-1974, formal tests of causation are performed among three socioeconomic phenomena: women's labor force participation rates, fertility rates, and divorce rates. Box-Jenkins and other techniques are employed with Granger-Sims type definition of...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions trumps' everything else. Once institutions are...

Does the environment have a causal effect on economic development? Using meteorological data, we reconstruct every country's exposure to the universe of tropical cyclones during 1950-2008. We exploit random within-country year-to-year variation in cyclone strikes to identify the causal effect of...

What is the effect of trade on a country's environment, for a given level of GDP? Some have observed an apparent positive correlation between openness to trade and measures of environmental quality. But this could be due to endogeneity of trade, rather than causality. This paper uses exogenous...

We provide evidence that the robust association between cognitive skills and economic growth reflects a causal effect of cognitive skills and supports the economic benefits of effective school policy. We develop a new common metric that allows tracking student achievement across countries, over...

Most of the future growth in energy use is forecast to come from the developing world. Understanding the likely pace and specific location of this growth is essential to inform decisions about energy infrastructure investments and to improve greenhouse gas emissions forecasts. We argue that...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of power density [Watts/m2] into economics. By introducing an explicit spatial structure into a simple general equilibrium model we are able to show how the power density of available energy resources determines the extent of energy...

While output declined in virtually all transition economies in the initial years, the speed and extent of the recovery that followed has varied widely across these countries. The contrast between the more and less successful transitions, the latter largely in the former Soviet Union, raises many...