Do variations in the degree of religiosity across countries translate into predictable differences in cross-country growth experiences? We apply a model averaging procedure to investigate the empirical robustness of linkages between religiosity and growth when other fundamental growth...

Barro and McCleary (2003) is a key research contribution in the new literature exploring the macroeconomic effects of religious beliefs. This paper represents an effort to evaluate the strength of their claims. We evaluate their results in terms of replicability and robustness. While we find...

The recent growth literature has seen an explosion of work exploring the role of new and fundamental theories of growth such as geography, institutions, ethnic fractionalization, and religion. Nevertheless, claims about the empirical validity of these new growth theories are typically made...

We uncover evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the growth experience of countries using a structural threshold regression methodology. Our findings suggest that studies that seek to promote mono-causal explanations in the institutions versus geography debate in growth are potentially misleading

We employ a structural threshold regression methodology to investigate the heterogeneous effects of debt on growth using public debt as a threshold variable as well as several other plausible variables. Our methodology allows us to address three sources of model uncertainty that characterize...