We investigate how urban concentration and urbanization affect economic growth in developing countries. Using semi-parametric estimation techniques on a cross-country panel of 39 countries for the years 1960-1990 we discover a U-shaped relationship for urban concentration. This suggests the...

While there have been some references in the literature to the potential role of the general decline in rainfall in sub-Saharan African nations on their poor growth performance relative to other developing countries, this avenue remains empirically unexplored. In this paper we use a new...

We estimate the impact of hurricane strikes on local economic growth rates and how this is reflected in more aggregate growth patterns. To this end we assemble a panel data set of US coastal counties' growth rates and construct a hurricane destruction index that is based on a monetary loss...