This paper revisits four recent cross-country empirical studies on the effects of inequality on growth. All four studies report strongly significant negative effects, using the popular system generalized method of moments estimator that is frequently used in cross-country growth empirics. This...

Ethiopia has experienced a growth acceleration over the past decade on the back of an economic strategy emphasizing public infrastructure investment and supported by heterodox macro-financial policies. To analyze the country?s growth performance during 2000?13, the paper employs a neoclassical...

This paper examines the effect of finance on long-term economic growth using Bayesian model averaging to address model uncertainty in cross-country growth regressions. The literature largely focuses on financial indicators that assess the financial depth of banks and stock markets. These...

This paper examines the problem of variable selection in linear regression models. Bayesian model averaging has become an important tool in empirical settings with large numbers of potential regressors and relatively limited numbers of observations. The paper analyzes the effect of a variety of...

The authors present a measure of jointness to explore dependence among regressors in the context of Bayesian model selection. The jointness measure they propose equals the posterior odds ratio between those models that include a set of variables and the models that only include proper subsets....

Although emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) weathered the global recession a decade ago relatively well, they now appear less well placed to cope with the substantial downside risks facing the global economy. In many EMDEs, the room for monetary and fiscal policies to respond to...

Using firm-level data covering 709 cities in 128 countries, this paper examines the role of a comprehensive list of business environment variables at the subnational level in explaining firm employment and productivity growth. The analysis finds basic protection, access to finance and...

This paper examines the causal relationship between energy efficiency and economic growth based on panel data for 56 high- and middle-income countries from 1978 to 2012. Using a panel vector autoregression approach, the study finds evidence of a long-run Granger causality from economic growth to...