Marrazzo, Pasquale MarcoTerzi, Alessio2019-06-122017-04Marrazzo, Pasquale Marco, and Alessio Terzi. "Wide-reaching Structural Reforms and Growth: A Cross-country Synthetic Control Approach." CID Research Fellow and Graduate Student Working Paper Series 2017.82, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, April 2017.http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40554751At a time of slow growth in several advanced and emerging countries, calls for more structural reforms are multiplying. However, estimations of the short- and medium-term impact of these reforms on GDP growth remain methodologically problematic and still highly controversial. We contribute to this literature by making a novel use of the non-parametric Synthetic Control Method to estimate the impact of 23 wide-reaching structural reform packages (including both real and financial sector measures) rolled out in 22 countries between 1961 and 2000. Our results suggest that, on average, reforms started having a significant positive effect on GDP per capita only after five years. Ten years after the beginning of a reform wave, GDP per capita was roughly 6 percentage points higher than the synthetic counterfactual scenario. However, average point estimates mask a large heterogeneity of outcomes. Benefits tended to materialise earlier, but overall to be more limited, in advanced economies than in emerging markets. These results are confirmed when we use a parametric dynamic panel fixed effect model to control for the rich dynamics of GDP, and are robust to a variety of alternative specifications, placebo and falsification tests, and to different indicators of reform.en-USResearch Paper or Report2019-06-12