We examine the average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. For each country affected by a large disaster, we compute the counterfactual by constructing synthetic controls. We find that only extremely large...

We examine the short and long run average causal impact of catastrophic natural disasters on economic growth by combining information from comparative case studies. We assess the counterfactual of the cases studied by constructing synthetic control groups taking advantage of the fact that the...

Although there exists abundant literature about convergence across the Spanish regions, most of the research has been developed by using cross-section regressions or data panel techniques with fixed effects, resulting in biased estimates that may make their conclusions less tenable. In addition,...

How much does public capital matter for economic growth? How large should it be? This paper attempts to answer these questions, taking the case of SSA countries. It develops and estimates a model that posits a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth, to determine the...

Firm heterogeneity and the allocation of resources across firms play a key role in determining aggregate productivity. Entry barriers and misallocation can substantially impact productivity, as evidenced in recent work. This article provides a unifying theoretical framework and a review of this...

In the last two decades, large scale CGE models used for environmental policy assessment underwent an important upgrade to integrate endogenous technological progress. Nevertheless, several complexities of innovation are still neglected even if they are of primary interest for policymakers. This...

In this study, we examine both stochastic and deterministic convergence in the logarithm of the relative per capita income of eighteen EU countries. The panel stationary test developed by Carrion-i Silvestre et al. (2005) is employed over the period 1950-2010. The univariate results attained...

This paper investigates labour productivity dynamics for 1263 regional economies of the European Union during 1991-2007. Despite convergence is usually found to occur conditionally to economy-wide factors, this study reveals a clear process of unconditional convergence for nancial and...