Do high levels of human capital foster economic growth by facilitating technology adoption? If so, countries with more human capital should have adopted more rapidly the skilled-labor augmenting technologies becoming available since the 1970’s. High human capital levels should therefore have...

We find that trade and domestic market size are robust determinants of economic growth over the 1960-1996 period when trade openness is measured as the US dollar value of imports and exports relative to GDP in PPP US$ ('real openness'). When trade openness is measured as the US dollar value of...

According to the economic approach to political transitions, transitory negative economic shocks can open a window of opportunity for democratic improvement. Testing the theory requires a source of transitory shocks to the aggregate economy. We use rainfall shocks in Sub-Saharan African...

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Can agnostics rely on international income data to tell them which matter? We find that agnostic priors lead to conclusions that are sensitive to differences across available income estimates. For example, the PWT 6.2...

Does cutting red tape foster entrepreneurship in industries with the potential to expand? We address this question by combining the time needed to comply with government entry procedures in 45 countries with industry-level data on employment growth and growth in the number of establishments...

This note tries to clarify some remaining issues in the debate on the effect of income shocks on civil conflict. Section 1 discusses the discrepant findings on the effect of rainfall shocks on civil conflict in Miguel and Satyanath (2010, 2011) and Ciccone (2011). Section 2 develops an...