We study the impact of climate volatility on economic growth exploiting data on 133 countries between 1960 and 2005. We show that the conditional (ex ante) volatility of annual temperatures increased steadily over time, rendering climate conditions less predictable across countries, with...

This doctoral thesis, organized in three self-contained chapters, provides an analysis of the economic effects associated with the extraction of natural resources and the transition from an economy based on fossil fuel use to an economy relying primarily on renewable energy sources. Chapter 1...

We analyze the implications of financial openness to macroeconomic volatility in a small open economy. Major macroeconomic aggregates show non-monotonic volatility patterns with respect to the degree of financial openness in the model without domestic financial frictions. The introduction of...

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? Gabaix (2011) shows that idosyncratic shocks can have aggregate effects if the distribution of firm sizes in manufacturing follows a power law distribution. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we expand the theory of granularity...

In this paper we characterize empirically the comovements of macro variables typically observed in middle income countries, as well as the boom-bust cycle that has been observed during the last two decades. We find that many countries that have liberalized their financial markets, have witnessed...