An influential hypothesis explaining the persistence of global productivity differences is that frontier technologies are finely tuned to the local conditions of the high-income countries that develop them and inappropriate for application elsewhere. This paper studies how environmental...

The World Economic Forum recognizes that while restrictions on energy affect water systems and vise versa, energy and water policy are rarely coordinated. The International Panel on Climate Change predicts that wet places will become wetter and dry places will become dryer. Transboundary water,...

By studying the interaction between social capital and decentralization, we show that political decentralization can be a source of divergence across heterogeneous regions. In particular, we claim that since the local endowments of social capital display their effect on the economy mainly...

This paper examines whether growth regressions should incorporate dualism and structural change. If there is a differential across sectors in the marginal product of labour, changes in the structure of employment can raise aggregate total factor productivity. The paper develops empirical growth...

Long-run development (in income) causes a large fall in the share of agriculture commonly known as the agricultural transition. We confirm that this conventional wisdom is strongly supported by the data. Long-run development (in income) also causes a large increase in democracy known as the...

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. Our statistical framework uses light growth to supplement existing income growth measures. The framework is applied to countries with...

Seit dem Jahr 2000 haben vielfältige Faktoren die Agrarmärkte beeinflusst. Darunter sind wiederholte Angebotsknappheiten und die globale Nachfrageentwicklung zu nennen, welche den beobachteten Preisanstieg begünstigten. Angesichts der zunehmenden Interdependenz der Märkte stellt sich die...

This paper analyzes the transmission from global commodity to domestic food prices for a large set of countries. First, a theoretical model is developed to explain price transmission for different trade regimes. Drawing from the competitive storage model under rational expectations, it is shown...

This paper combines an econometric analysis of the response of energy demand to temperature and humidity exposure with future scenarios of climate change and socioeconomic development to characterize climate impacts on energy demand at different spatial scales. Globally, future climate change is...