One of the most striking features of economic growth is the process of structural change whereby the share of agriculture in GDP decreases as countries develop. The cross-country growth literature typically estimates an aggregate homogeneous production function or convergence regression model...

The climate damage function used to assess the economic impact of secular changes in temperature and precipitation is one of the most speculative components of integrated assessment models of climate change. Existing work informing this debate is based on pooled empirical models incorporating...

We develop an empirical model to predict banking crises in a sample of 60 low-incomecountries (LICs) over the 1981-2015 period. Given the recent emergence of financial sectorstress associated with low commodity prices in several LICs, we assign price movements inprimary commodities a key role in...

We motivate and empirically analyse the idea that democratic regime change is not a discrete event but a two-stage process: in the first stage, autocracies enter into an ‘episode’ of political liberalization which can last for years or even decades; in the second stage, the ultimate outcome...