Empirical Economic Growth Literature: Robustness, Significance and Size
The empirical economic growth literature is criticized for its lack of robustness. For different definitions of robustness, conclusions vary from almost every correlation is fragile to a substantial number of explanatory variables are robust. The authors re-analyze the empirical results of the economic growth literature for various alternative definitions of robustness using quasi-experiments.
Link
http://www.ersa.org/ersaconfs/ersa03/cdrom/papers/540.pdf