Leaders matter for growth, but does growth matter for leaders? We introduce a set of strong instruments for growth, based on hill-shaped relationships of agricultural output with temperature and precipitation, to test the causal effect of growth on national leadership turnover, after controlling...

We use popular non-parametric (CART, TreeNet) and parametric (logit) techniques to identify robust economic, demographic and political conditions that lead to shifts in control in the executive branch of government in 162 countries during the period 1960–2004. We find that institutional...

Surprisingly little is known about the impact of resource booms on income inequality in resource rich countries. This paper develops a simple theory, in the context of a two sector growth model in which learning-by-doing drives growth, to explain the time path of inequality following a resource...

To improve short-horizon exchange rate forecasts, we employ foreign exchange market risk factors as fundamentals, and Bayesian treed Gaussian process (BTGP) models to handle non-linear, time-varying relationships between these fundamentals and exchange rates. Forecasts from the BTGP model...