This paper introduces a novel approach for dealing with the 'curse of dimensionality' in the case of large linear dynamic systems. Restrictions on the coefficients of an unrestricted VAR are proposed that are binding only in a limit as the number of endogenous variables tends to infinity. It is...

The number of variables related to long-run economic growth is large compared with the number of countries. Bayesian model averaging is often used to impose parsimony in the cross-country growth regression. The underlying prior is that many of the considered variables need to be excluded from...

This paper addresses the mechanisms by which trade openness affects growth volatility. Using a diverse set of export concentration measures, we present strong evidence pointing to an important role for export diversification in conditioning the effect of trade openness on growth volatility....

A number of recent papers have found that certain measures of pollution worsen and later improve as income per head increases. It is widely believed that the downhill portion of this inverted-U curve reflects an induced policy response; that, as incomes rise, citizens demand improvements in...

The number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced-form relationship between a country's economic growth and the quantity of various pollutants produced has recently increased significantly. In several cases researchers have found evidence in favor of an inverted-U...

This study explores the link between environmental degradation, economic growth and income inequality within the framework of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature. To investigate this issue, we examine how inequality affects carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their relationship with...

In this paper we investigate the existence and shape of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) by means of nonparametric methods. We also investigate the issues involved in the choice of nonparametric estimator. We find that the nature of the economic relationship and the quality of environmental...

In many OECD countries income inequality has risen, but surprisingly re-distribution as well. The theory attributes this partly to the redistributive effect of education spending. In the model income inequality and growth depend in an inverted U-shaped way on education. To maintain a given level...

We consider the relationship between tourism and economic growth for Latin American countries since 1985 until 1998. The analysis proposed is based on a panel data approach and the Arellano-Bond estimator for dynamic panels. We obtain estimates of the relationship between economic growth and...

We examine empirically the effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth. We find that natural resources have a negative impact on growth when considered in isolation, but a positive impact on growth when including in the analysis other variables such as corruption, investments,...