Levels of economic development vary widely within countries in the Americas. This paper argues that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial era. Colonizers engaged in different economic activities in different regions of a country, depending on local conditions. Some activities were...

Levels of economic development vary widely within countries in the Americas. This paper argues that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial era. Colonizers engaged in different economic activities in different regions of a country, depending on local conditions. Some activities were...

Levels of development vary widely within countries in the Americas. We argue that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial era, when colonizers engaged in different economic activities in different regions of a country.We present evidence consistent with the view that “bad”...

This article generates innovative confidence intervals for two of the most popular de-trending methods: Hodrick-Prescott and band-pass filters. The confidence intervals are obtained using block-bootstrapping techniques for dependent data. GDP trend growth and output gap intervals for the G7...