This paper examines two related questions: what effects do infectious diseases exert on growth and development, and are they quantitatively important? We present evidence on the effect of health and infectious diseases on economic development using Hansen’s (2000) endogenous threshold...

We investigate the role of initial conditions at colonial independence on economic growth in Africa in the post-independence period using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA). A key innovation in our estimation methodology is that we incorporate parameter heterogeneity in model averaging as well as...