I Just Ran Four Million Regressions

Abstract

In this paper I try to move away from the Extreme Bounds method of identifying "robust" empirical relations in the economic growth literature. Instead of analyzing the extreme bounds of the estimates of the coefficient of a particular variable, I analyze the entire distribution. My claim in this paper is that, if we do this, the picture emerging from the empirical growth literature is not the pessimistic "Nothing is Robust" that we get with the extreme bound analysis. Instead, we find that a substantial number of variables can be found to be strongly related to growth.

JEL Classification: O51, O52, O53