Existing work in growth empirics either assumes linearity of the growth function or attempts to capture non-linearities by the addition of a small number of quadratic or multiplicative interaction terms. Under a more generalized failure of linearity or if the functional form taken by the...

International development economists have made strong claims about what causes developing nations to grow. But are the statistical techniques used to assess such causal factors refined enough to justify the claims made? One economist who has done leading work in the field raises serious questions.

This paper presents empirical estimates of a gravity model of bilateral migration that properly accounts for non-linearities and tackles causality issues through an instrumental variables approach. In contrast to the existing literature, which is limited to OECD data, we have estimated our model...

Measuring banking competition using the HHI, Lerner index, or H-statistic can give conflicting results. Borrowing from frontier analysis, the authors provide an alternative approach and apply it to Spain over 1992-2005. Controlling for differences in asset composition, productivity, scale...

In 2004, the Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters whom had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to...

We evaluate the success of the Venezuelan government's latest nationwide literacy program, Misión Robinson, using official Venezuelan government survey data. Controlling for existing trends in literacy rates by age groups over the period 1975-2005, we find at most a small positive effect of...

This paper presents an empirical test of a subclass of poverty traps hypotheses. The test is based on the observation that the nonconvexities in the production function necessary to generate multiple equilibria need only be present in the region between the equilibria. Increasing returns should...

This paper studies Venezuelan economic performance from 1950 to 1998. We show that there exist wide divergences in many commonly used estimates of GDP growth and discuss the sources of those differences. We show that the choice of base year and linking techniques are crucial for the diagnosis of...

We study episodes where economic growth decelerates to negative rates. While the majority of these episodes are of short duration, a substantial fraction last for a longer period of time than can be explained as the result of business-cycle dynamics. The duration, depth and associated output...