Climate research suggests that global warming will lead to more frequent and more extreme natural disasters. Most disasters are local events with effects on local economic activity. Hence, assessing their economic impacts with the help of econometric country-level analysis may lead to biased...

In this paper we study how differences in the quality of countries' institutions affect the impact of natural hazards in these countries. To do so, we first build a new data set that allows us to adequately control for countries' development and geological characteristics and, importantly,...

Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...