We uncover evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the growth experience of countries using a structural threshold regression methodology. Our findings suggest that studies that seek to promote mono-causal explanations in the institutions versus geography debate in growth are potentially...

This paper extends the simple threshold regression framework of Hansen (2000) and Caner and Hansen (2004) to allow for endogeneity of the threshold variable. We develop a concentrated least squares estimator of the threshold parameter based on an inverse Mills ratio bias correction. We show that...

Do variations in the degree of religiosity across countries translate into predictable differences in cross-country growth experiences? We apply a model averaging procedure to investigate the empirical robustness of linkages between religiosity and growth when other fundamental growth...

Barro and McCleary (2003) is a key research contribution in the new literature exploring the macroeconomic effects of religious beliefs. This paper represents an effort to evaluate the strength of their claims. We evaluate their results in terms of replicability and robustness. While we find...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between foreign aid and growth using recently developed sample splitting methods that allow us to uncover evidence for the existence of heterogeneity and nonlinearity simultaneously. We also implement a new methodology that allows us to deal with...