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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Is there a Debt-Threshold Effect on Output Growth? Abstract This paper studies the long-run impact of public debt expansion on economic growth and investigates whether the debt-growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop tests for threshold effects in the context of dynamic heterogeneous panel data models with crosssectionally dependent errors and illustrate, by means of Monte Carlo experiments, that they perform well in small samples. On the empirical side, using data on a sample of 40 countries (grouped into advanced and developing) over the 1965-2010 period, we find no evidence for a universally applicable threshold effect in the relationship between public debt and economic growth, once we account for the impact of global factors and their spillover effects. Regardless of the threshold, however, we find significant negative long-run effects of public debt build-up on output growth. Provided that public debt is on a downward trajectory, a country with a high level of debt can grow just as fast as its peers. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-Code: C230, E620, F340, H600.

This paper employs a dynamic multi-country framework to analyze the international macroeconomic transmission of El Niño weather shocks. This framework comprises 21 country/region-specific models, estimated over the period 1979Q2 to 2013Q1, and accounts for not only direct exposures of countries to El Niño shocks but also indirect effects through third-markets. We contribute to the climate-macroeconomy literature by exploiting exogenous variation in El Niño weather events over time, and their impact on different regions cross-sectionally, to causatively identify the effects of El Niño shocks on growth, inflation, energy and non-fuel commodity prices. The results show that there are considerable heterogeneities in the responses of different countries to El Niño shocks. While Australia, Chile, Indonesia, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa face a short-lived fall in economic activity in response to an El Niño shock, for other countries (including the United States and European region), an El Niño occurrence has a growth-enhancing effect. Furthermore, most countries in our sample experience short-run inflationary pressures as both energy and non-fuel commodity prices increase. Given these findings, macroeconomic policy formulation should take into consideration the likelihood and effects of El Niño weather episodes.

This paper explores whether natural resource abundance is a curse or a blessing. In order to do so, we …rstly develop a theory consistent econometric model, in which we show that there is a long run relationship between real income, the investment rate, and the real value of oil production. Secondly, we investigate the long-run (level) e¤ects of natural resource abundance on domestic output as well as the short-run (growth) e¤ects. Thirdly, we make use of a non-stationary panel approach which explicitly estimates the long-run relationships from annual data as opposed to the dynamic and static panel approaches which might in fact estimate the high-frequency relationships. Fourthly, we account for cross-country dependencies that arise potentially from oil price shocks and other unobserved common factors, and allow countries to respond di¤erently to these shocks. Finally, we explicitly recognize that there is a substantial heterogeneity in our sample, consisting of 53 oil exporting and importing countries with annual data between 1980-2006, and adopt the methodology developed by Pesaran (2006) for estimation. This approach considers di¤erent dynamics for each country and is consistent under both cross-sectional dependence and cross-country heterogeneity. We also check the robustness of these results by using the fully modi…ed OLS method of Pedroni (2000). Our non-stationary approach also allows for country-speci…c unobserved factors, such as social and human capital, to be captured in the …xed e¤ects and the heterogeneous trends together with any omitted factors. Our estimation results, using the real value of oil production, rent or reserves as a proxy for resource endowment, indicate that oil abundance is in fact a blessing and not a curse, exhibited through both the long-run and the short-run e¤ects.JEL Classi…cations: C23, O13, O40, Q32.

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