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.