In “Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes,” Robin Hanson presents a characteristically pathbreaking analysis, of economic growth over the history of the genus Homo. The paper shows that, across 2 million years, the data series for gross world product (GWP) can be modeled as a...

The Burnside and Dollar (2000, AER) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970 -93 to 1970 -97, as well as filling in missing data for the...

Background. Millions of children under 60 months old are undernourished globally. Olofin et al. (2013) investigates the risks associated with suboptimal growth in such children using older data from prospective cohort studies in 10 countries. The Cox proportional hazards model is fit to each...

The Commitment to Development Index (CDI) ranks 21 of the world's richest countries on their dedication to policies that benefit the five billion people living in poorer nations. Moving beyond simple comparisons of foreign aid, the CDI ranks countries on seven themes: quantity and quality of...

Like many public policy debates, that over whether foreign aid works carries on in two worlds. Within the research world, it plays out in the form of papers full of technical language, formulas, and numbers. Outside, the arguments are plainer and the audience broader, but those academic studies...

The cross-country literature on foreign aid effectiveness has relied on the use of instruments to distinguish causality from mere correlation. This paper uses simple non-instrumental techniques in the spirit of Granger to demonstrate that the main aid-growth connection is a negative causal...

Duflo (2001) exploits a 1970s schooling expansion in Indonesia to estimate the returns to schooling. Under the study’s difference-in-differences (DID) design, two patterns in the data—shallower pay scales for younger workers and negative selection in treatment—can violate the parallel...

The way out of the quagmire, he argued, was for econometricians to explore larger regions of "specification space," systematically analyzing the relationship between assumptions and conclusions. Their evidence: the statistical significance in crosscountry panel growth regressions of an...

Summan, Nandi, and Bloom (2023; SNB) finds that exposure of babies to India's Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) in the late 1980s increased their weekly wages in early adulthood by 0.138 log points and per-capita household consumption 0.028 points. But the results are attained by regressing on...