Growth theory predicts that natural disasters should, on impact, lower GDP per capita. However, the empirical literature does not offer conclusive evidence. Most existing studies use disaster data drawn from damage records of insurance companies. We argue that this may lead to estimation bias as...

Using data from U.S. commodity flow survey, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between U.S. states by about 13%. The finding is robust over econometric models, survey waves, or aggregation levels. Including contemporaneous controls, such as network...

Natural disasters affect bilateral trade. We use this fact to generalize the instrumental variables strategy of Frankel and Romer (1999) to a panel setup. This allows revisiting an old question: Does openness cause per capita GDP? We work with a modified gravity framework in which we interact...

Die Studie präsentiert eine Datenbank, die sich auf physikalische Maßeinheiten von Naturkatastrophen stützt und die Schätzung der Auswirkungen von Naturkatastrophen auf die Wirtschaftsleistung ermöglicht. Naturkatastrophen wirken sich im Durchschnitt ganz klar negativ auf das BIP pro Kopf...

Using SPS measures obtained from the SPS Information Management System of the WTO and controlling for zero trade flows, we find that SPS concerns reduce the probability of trade in agricultural and food products consistently. However, the amount of trade is positively affected by SPS measures...

In an attempt to disentangle the impact of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures on trade patterns, we estimate a Heckman selection model on the HS4 disaggregated level of trade. We find that aggregated SPS measures constitute barriers to agricultural and food trade consistently to all...

Do natural disasters trigger intensified international migration? The aim of this paper is to assess the extent to which disasters initiate bilateral migration. To motivate the empirical strategy, I construct a stylized theoretical gravity model of migration that introduces disasters as random...

In an attempt to disentangle the impact of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures on trade patterns, we estimate a Heckman selection model on the HS4 disaggregated level of trade. We find that aggregated SPS measures constitute barriers to agricultural and food trade consistently to all...