We examine the relationship between oil price windfalls and labor market regulation empirically through panel regressions in a sample of 83 countries spanning 1970-2014. We find that oil price windfall gains lead to a deregulation of the labor market in autocracies but have no effects in...

Theory and conventional wisdom suggest that an increase in uncertainty in one country scares away foreign investment. But, due to the limited availability of cross-country uncertainty data, empirical evidence remains scarce, and mostly confined to a limited set of countries. This paper provides...

There has been a steady increase in the occurrence of natural disasters. Yet their effect on economic growth remains unclear, with some studies reporting negative, and others indicating no, or even positive effects. These seemingly contradictory findings can be reconciled by exploring the...

March 2000 - Saving rates vary considerably across countries and over time. Policies that spur development are an indirect but effective way to raise private saving rates - which rise with the level and growth rate of real per capita income. Loayza, Schmidt-Hebbel, and Servén investigate the...

This paper studies the apparent contradictions between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private domestic credit...

The paper examines the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a new cross-country panel dataset on the distribution of income and expenditure. It uses an econometric methodology to gauge whether a larger middle class has a causal effect on policy and...