Optimal Weather Conditions, Economic Growth, and Political Transitions

Neila Cáceres and Samuel Malone

World Development, 2015, vol. 66, issue C, 16-30

Abstract: Studies that test the effect of economic outcomes on political transitions using weather variations as instruments have generally overlooked findings from climate science that economic output is a hill-shaped, rather than linear, function of temperature and precipitation levels. We design an improved set of instruments for growth based on this fact, and find that growth-maximizing temperatures coincide with levels that maximize energy sector output in the climate response literature. Previous studies significantly overestimate the increase in the probability of democratic transitions resulting from negative growth shocks, although we find leadership transition frequencies rise significantly following transitions to democracy.

Keywords: leadership; economic growth; political economy; democratic transitions; climate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X14002137
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:66:y:2015:i:c:p:16-30

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.07.011

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().