Technical progress can be expected to reduce transport costs over time, yet most studies of bilateral trade based on the gravity model find distance effects to be increasing rather than decreasing. We investigate countries' openness to international trade (the ratio of exports plus imports to...

We decisively reject the hypothesis that geographical factors influence long-run only indirectly, through the quality of institutions. The direct influence of geography on per capita incomes is robust to the inclusion of a sub-Saharan Africa dummy and other tests. We obtain our results by...

We investigate the determinants of onset, duration and incidence of civil wars, and their sensitivity to different coding rules. Whatever the coding rule used, incidence of civil war is largely determined by poverty, country size, mountainous terrain and ethnic diversity. Poverty reduces the...

We expand Hanushek and Kimko's (2000) analysis of the relationship between schooling quality, as measured by scores in international tests, and growth. We take account of another fifteen years of growth and approximately twice as many test score results. We treat the data first as a panel,...

The procyclicality of fiscal policy that is prevalent in developing countries and emerging markets is well known. Its explanation is less clear. Recently, social inequality and the combination of corruption and democracy have been suggested as alternatives to the traditional explanation of these...

We use new data on the timing of the transition to agriculture, developed by Putterman and Trainor (2006), to test the theory of Diamond (1997) and Olsson and Hibbs (2005) that an earlier transition is reflected in higher incomes today. Our results confirm the theory, even after controlling for...