A Reply to “A Replication of “Economic Development and the Impacts of Natural Disasters” (Economics Letters 2007)”

Abstract

In this reply we offer a response to the Mercer and Reed (2015) replication of Toya and Skidmore (2007). The replication study extends the original work in several important dimensions and is a very useful contribution. Nevertheless, we offer additional evaluation and discussion of the robustness portion of their replication. In particular, we consider the fixed effects and interval regression estimates.