Does trade openness cause higher GDP per capita? Since the seminal instrumental variables (IV) estimates of Frankel and Romer [F&R](1999) important doubts have surfaced. Is the correlation spurious and driven by omitted geographical and institutional variables? In this paper, we generalize F&R's...

While the short-term growth consequences of natural disasters are comparatively well studied, there is little knowledge how disasters affect long-run growth. Based on truly exogenous storm indicators, derived from a meteorological database, we show that the growth effects of tropical storms go...

Using the 1988 earthquake in Nepal as a natural experiment, we examine the long-term repercussions of a large exogenous physical shock on human capital accumulation. We exploit the quasi-random spatial and temporal nature of ground tremors to evaluate the long-term impact of earthquake on...

Climate change causes natural disasters to occur at higher frequency and increased severity. Using a unique dataset on German banks, this paper explores how regionally less diversified banks in Germany adjusted their loan loss provisioning following the severe summer flood of 2013, which...

This paper examines the impact of severe wildfire events on Bolivia's poverty and labor market outcomes. We use a panel from 2005 to 2020 utilizing NASA's MODIS Collection-6 MCD64A1 burned area product and household surveys. To attain survey representativeness at a lower geographical level, we...