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Working Paper
The deep historical roots of macroeconomic volatility
We present cross-country evidence that a country?s macroeconomic volatility, measured either by the standard deviation of output growth or the occurrence of trend-growth breaks, is significantly affected by the country?s historical variables. In particular, countries with longer histories of state-level political institutions experience less macroeconomic volatility in post-war periods. Robustness checks reveal that the effect of this historical variable on volatility remains significant and substantial after controlling for a host of structural variables investigated in previous studies. We ...