I am a macroeconomist working at the Department of Economics and Business of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and ICREA. I am a Research Professor of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics and a Research Associate of the CREI. I direct the MSc in Economics organized by the Barcelona GSE and the UPF Department of Economics and Business, and am on the steering committee of the Barcelona GSE 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.

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At the 2010 World Congress of the Econometric Society in Shanghai I discussed Gino Gancia, Andrea Müller, and Fabrizio Zilibotti’s “Directed Technology Adoption and Productivity Differences“. My discussion focused on their theory’s implications for international wage premia. I also discussed Chad Jones’ “Misallocation, Economic Growth, and Input-Output Economics“. My discussion pointed to instances where the allocation of inputs is optimal and measured misallocation reflects faster technological progress.  I also discussed different ways of modelling input linkages (and their implications for the TFP multiplier) and explored how input linkages may induce vertical intergration.

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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.

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Francesco Caselli (LSE), Rafael DiTella (Harvard), Gerard Padró i Miquel (LSE), and I have organized a conference on the political economy of economic development on April 30 and May 1, 2010 (program and most papers). Timothy Besley (LSE) and James Robinson (Harvard) gave keynote speeches. The conference was at Món Sant Benet and has been sponsored by CREI and Caixa Manresa.

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My 21 April 2009 Royal Economics Society conference presentation of International commodity prices, growth, and the outbreak of civil war in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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At the 2009 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.

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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).

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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.