I am a macroeconomist working at the Department of Economics and Business of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and ICREA. I am an Affiliated Professor of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and a Research Associate of the CREI. At the Barcelona GSE, I am program director of the MSc in Economics, jointly organized with the Department of Economics and Business of UPF, and on the steering committee of the MSc in International Trade, Finance, and Development. I am also one of the research project directors at Fedea and one of the editors of The Economic Journal.

________________________________

In Transitory Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict I show that to determine the effect of shocks on civil conflict, it is critical to tailor the empirical approach to the persistence of shocks. I illustrate my point by revisiting a cornerstone of the literature on the economics of civil conflict, Miguel, Satyanath, and Sergenti’s (2004) study of rainfall and civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. I find their approach to be inappropriate and their conclusions to be incorrect. For example, they conclude that higher rainfall levels are associated with significantly less civil conflict. I show that higher rainfall levels are actually associated with significantly more (not less) conflict in their data.

The data and estimation programs are available here. For previous versions of the paper scroll down Papers, presentations, and data. Some results have changed because the most recent version of the paper uses the latest data.

___________________________________________

Francesco Caselli (LSE), Rafael DiTella (Harvard), Gerard Padró i Miquel (LSE), and I are organizing a conference on the political economy of economic development on April 30 and May 1, 2010 (call). Timothy Besley (LSE) and James Robinson (Harvard) will give keynote speeches. The conference will be at Món Sant Benet and is sponsored by CREI and Caixa Manresa.

_____________________________

Markus Brückner and I completed the revision of Rainfall and the Democratic Window of Opportunity, which shows that negative, transitory economic shocks tend to be followed by improvements in democratic institutions. There is also a Supplementary Appendix with additional empirical results. _____________________________

International commodity prices, growth, and the outbreak of civil war in Sub-Saharan Africa with Markus Brückner (forthcoming, The Economic Journal).

The 21 April 2009 Royal Economics Society conference presentation is also available.

_____________________________

At the RES conference I also discussed Chang-Tai Hsieh and Peter Klenow’s “What have we learned about growth?”. My comment focused on the contribution of schooling to development accounting. I argued that the development accounting framework is not well suited for the scenario where different schooling levels are imperfect substitutes (which seems the relevant case). But–maybe surprisingly–the answers of development accounting turn out to be quite accurate answers to a slightly different question: how much would productivity rise if poor countries were to close (only) the schooling gap with rich countries? (Unfortunately the answer is “not much.”) My slides are available in ppt and pdf.

_____________________________

My presentation (ppt, pdf) at the EDR conference May 7-8 in Barcelona. It is about whether negative rainfall shocks and international commodity price shocks started civil conflicts/wars in Sub-Saharan Africa. The main empirical result is that they did. I show that establishing this result involves understanding and correctly modelling the difference between transitory shocks (like rainfall shocks) and permanent shocks (like commodity price shocks).

_____________________________

Walter Garcia-Fontes and I wrote a paper on The Quality of the Catalan and Spanish Education Systems: A Perspective from PISA which is part of a public policy project co-ordinated by Pankaj Ghemawat and Xavier Vives of IESE. The appendix is available here.