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      Enemies of the People

      1 , 2
      American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
      American Economic Association

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          Abstract

          The Soviet regime forcedly sent millions of enemies of the people, i.e. the educated elite considered a threat to the regime, to Gulag camps across the USSR. We use this large-scale episode of terror as a natural experiment to provide evidence on the long-run persistence of human capital across generations and its effect on economic growth. We combine archive data from the Gulag with the 2018 Russian firm census to show that areas around camps with a larger share of enemies among camp prisoners are more prosperous today, as captured by firms' wages and profits, and night lights per capita. (JEL D22, J24, J82, N34, N94, P31, R12)

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          Unobservable Selection and Coefficient Stability: Theory and Evidence

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            MEASURING ECONOMIC GROWTH FROM OUTER SPACE.

            GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an indicator of income is uncorrelated with measurement error in national income accounts. For countries with good national income accounts data, information on growth of lights is of marginal value in estimating the true growth rate of income, while for countries with the worst national income accounts, the optimal estimate of true income growth is a composite with roughly equal weights. Among poor-data countries, our new estimate of average annual growth differs by as much as 3 percentage points from official data. Lights data also allow for measurement of income growth in sub- and supranational regions. As an application, we examine growth in Sub Saharan African regions over the last 17 years. We find that real incomes in non-coastal areas have grown faster by 1/3 of an annual percentage point than coastal areas; non-malarial areas have grown faster than malarial ones by 1/3 to 2/3 annual percent points; and primate city regions have grown no faster than hinterland areas. Such applications point toward a research program in which "empirical growth" need no longer be synonymous with "national income accounts."
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              When Should You Adjust Standard Errors for Clustering?

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
                American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
                American Economic Association
                1945-7707
                1945-7715
                January 01 2025
                January 01 2025
                : 17
                : 1
                : 310-342
                Affiliations
                [1 ] New Economic School (email: )
                [2 ] King's College London (email: )
                Article
                10.1257/mac.20220231
                f49c942a-c756-477c-ad3f-9a3e895f131a
                © 2025
                History

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