We revisit the debate of whether government spending is procyclical in developing countries. Our main contribution is to argue that, beyond exogeneity of the income shock, an empirical analysis of government spending cyclicality must be carefully tailored to the shock's persistence. We first...

This paper presents instrumental variables estimates of the effects of GDP per capita volatility on the size of government. We show that for a panel of 157 countries spanning more than half a century, rainfall volatility has a significant positive effect on GDP per capita volatility in countries...

This paper exploits the significant response of real GDP growth of Sub-Saharan African countries to exogenous international commodity price and rainfall shocks to construct instrumental variables estimates of the tax revenue elasticity IV estimates yield that a 1% increase in GDP increases tax...