War, whether external or internal, large or small, is a costly endeavor. Loss of life, loss of close friends or family, and the destruction of material possessions all play a part in the costs of war. The purpose of this paper is to capture only the material, economic welfare costs of conflict...

In the present paper it will be shown that in country level economic growth has a positive impact on stock prices in the long run. This study refers annually to the Western Europe, Japan and the United States during the period 1999-2007. Therefore, any factor favoring economic growth should be...

We study a series of growth models in which households' preferences display `jealousy' or `external habits': a negative dependence on average consumption. We argue that accounting for consumption externalities in growth models requires consideration of both their static and dynamic effects. In a...

Data quality in the Penn World Tables varies systematically across countries that have different growth rates and at different stages of economic development, thus introducing measurement error correlated with variables of economic interest. We explore the seriousness of this problem with three...

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major...

The paper investigates by means of cointegration analysis whether the recently observed low levels of private saving and the current account balance in the United States are worrisome in the sense that they cannot be sufficiently explained by determinants which performed well in the past. Stock...

We estimate models of consumption growth that allow for long-run risks and disasters using data for a series of countries over a time span of 200 years. Our estimates indicate that a model with small and frequent disasters that arrive at a mean-reverting rate best fits international consumption...