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Working Paper
Oil, Volatility and Institutions: Cross-Country Evidence from Major Oil Producers
This paper examines the long-run effects of oil revenue and its volatility on economic growth as well as the role of institutions in this relationship. We collect annual and monthly data on a sample of 17 major oil producers over the period 1961-2013, and use the standard panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach as well as its cross-sectionally augmented version (CS-ARDL) for estimation. Therefore, in contrast to the earlier literature on the resource curse, we take into account all three key features of the panel: dynamics, heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. Our ...
Working Paper
Understanding Climate Damages: Consumption versus Investment
Existing climate-economy models use aggregate damage functions to model the effects of climate change. This approach assumes climate change has equal impacts on the productivity of firms that produce consumption and investment goods or services. We show the split between damage to consumption and investment productivity matters for the dynamic consequences of climate change. Drawing on the structural transformation literature, we develop a framework that incorporates heterogeneous climate damages. When investment is more vulnerable to climate, we find short-run consumption losses will be ...
Working Paper
The U.S. oil supply revolution and the global economy
This paper investigates the global macroeconomic consequences of falling oil prices due to the oil revolution in the United States, using a Global VAR model estimated for 38 countries/regions over the period 1979Q2 to 2011Q2. Set-identification of the U.S. oil supply shock is achieved through imposing dynamic sign restrictions on the impulse responses of the model. The results show that there are considerable heterogeneities in the responses of different countries to a U.S. supply-driven oil price shock, with real GDP increasing in both advanced and emerging market oil-importing economies, ...
Working Paper
On the Transition to Modern Growth
We study a simple model where a single good can be produced using a diminishing-returns technology (Malthus) and a constant-returns technology (Solow). The economy's output exhibits three stages: (i) stagnation, (ii) transition with increasing growth, and (iii) constant growth in the long run. We map the Malthus technology to agriculture and show that the share of agricultural employment is sufficient to determine the onset of economic transition. Using data on the share, we estimate the onset of transition for the U.S. and Western Europe without using output data. Our model implies that ...
Working Paper
On the Transition to Modern Growth
We study a simple model where a single good can be produced using a diminishing-returns technology (Malthus) and a constant-returns technology (Solow). The economy's output exhibits three stages: (i) stagnation; (ii) transition with increasing growth; (iii) constant growth in the long run. We map the Malthus technology to agriculture and show that the share of employment in agriculture is sufficient to determine both the onset of economic transition and the dynamics of output during the transition. Using 20th century data on agricultural share of employment, we project backward and estimate ...
Working Paper
Industrialization and the demand for mineral commodities
This paper uses a new data set extending back to 1840 to investigate how industrialization affects the derived demand for mineral commodities. I establish that there is substantial heterogeneity in the long-run effect of manufacturing output on demand across five commodities after controlling for sectoral change, substitution and technological development. My results imply substantial differences across commodities with regard to future demand from industrializing countries and with regard to the effect of demand shocks on prices. Models should include non-Gormand preferences to account for ...
Working Paper
A staggered pricing approach to modeling speculative storage: implications for commodity price dynamics
This paper embeds a staggered price feature into the standard speculative storage model of Deaton and Laroque (1996). Intermediate goods inventory speculators are added as an additional source of intertemporal linkage, which helps us to replicate the stylized facts of the observed commodity price dynamics. Incorporating this type of friction into the model is motivated by its ability to increase price stickiness which, gives rise to a higher degree of persistence in the first two conditional moments of commodity prices. The structural parameters of our model are estimated by the simulated ...
Working Paper
Growth at Risk From Climate Change
How will climate change affect risks to economic activity? Research on climate impacts has tended to focus on effects on the average level of economic growth. I examine whether climate change may make severe contractions in economic activity more likely using quantile regressions linking growth to temperature. The effects of temperature on downside risks to economic growth are large and robust across specifications. These results suggest the growth at risk from climate change is large—climate change may make economic contractions more likely and severe and thereby significantly ...
Working Paper
Capital-Skill Complementarity in Manufacturing: Lessons from the US Shale Boom
This paper tests the existence of capital-skill complementarity in the manufacturing sector using quasi-experimental increases in the relative price of low-skill labor induced by the US shale boom. I find that in response to the shale boom, local manufacturing firms decreased their relative usage of low-skill labor while increasing their capital expenditures. These endogenous changes in the input mix allowed manufacturers to maintain the value added despite the increase in the price of low-skill labor, avoiding the potential short-term crowding-out effects of the natural resource boom. ...
Working Paper
On the Transition to Sustained Growth: The Importance of Recent Agricultural Employment
We study a model where a single good can be produced using a diminishing-returns technology (Malthus) and a constant-returns technology (Solow). We map the former to agriculture and show that the share of agricultural employment declines at a constant rate during the economic transition and that recent observations on the share are sufficient to estimate the onset of transition. Our model implies that (i) output growth is higher and increasing after the onset of transition, (ii) during the transition, it is a first-order autoregressive process, and (iii) the rate of decline in the share of ...