I Just Ran Four Million Regressions

Abstract

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