In this paper we use a transparent statistical methodology - synthetic control methods - to implement data-driven comparative studies about the impact of autocratic transition on real per capita GDP. The applied methodology compares the growth of countries that experienced a transition to...

This paper investigates the robustness of determinants of economic growth in the presence of model uncertainty, parameter heterogeneity and outliers. The robust model averaging approach introduced in the paper uses a flexible and parsimonious mixture modeling that allows for fat-tailed errors...

We study whether technology gains in sectors related to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) increase productivity in the rest of the economy. To separate exogenous gains in ICT from other technological progress, we use the relative price of ICT goods and services in a structural VAR...

Financial inclusion is a key factor for economic growth in most developing countries. This paper examines the relationship between financial inclusion and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) using panel data for the period 1990-2021. The empirical...

This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in industrial robots in a sample of advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial proportion of cross-country variation in automation. The relationship between institutions and robots is...

Usually, studies analyzing terrorism focus on the total number of casualties or attacks in a given county. However, per capita rates of terrorism are more likely to matter for individual welfare. Analyzing 214 countries from 1970 - 2014, we show that three stylized findings are overturned in...

This paper provides a new data set of regional income inequalities within countries based on satellite nighttime light data. We first empirically study the relationship between luminosity data and regional incomes for those countries where regional income data are available. We subsequently use...

This research empirically establishes and theoretically motivates the hypothesis that population aging has a hump-shaped effect on inventive activity. We estimate this hump-shaped relationship in a panel of 33 OECD countries over the period 1960-2012. The increasing part of the hump captures the...

This paper develops an occupation-level measure of Capital-Embodied Innovation (CEI) by matching patents with capital goods based on their text similarity. The impact of CEI on labor demand is heterogeneous, depending on the similarity between capital and occupational tasks. Specifically, CEI...

Utilizing panel data for 19 OECD countries we find suppor t for the hypothesis that a greater degree of product variety relative to the US helps to explain relative per capita GDP levels. The empirical work relies upon some direct measures of product variety calculated from 6-digit OECD export...