Minea and Parent (2012) also note that, since Reinhart and Rogoff (2010b) found that differences in median growth are much smaller than differences in average growth, researchers should be careful in examining the role of outliers and check whether their results are robust to using different sources of data. They illustrate the importance of these robustness tests by showing that alternative data sources yield results which are somewhat different from those of Reinhart and Rogoff (2010b). In particular, they use data from Maddison (2007) and the IMF Public Debt Database (Abbas, Belhocine, El-Ganainy, and Horton, 2011) and find that the reduction in average (and median) growth rate between countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio below and above 90 percent is small and not statistically significant (see Figure 1 in Minea
and Parent (2012)). Similarly, Afonso and Jalles (2013, see their Figure 2) show that, in a sample
of OECD countries, the average growth rates over the period 1970-2008 of countries with
low debt (debt-to-GDP ratio < 30%) is similar to that of high debt (debt-to-GDP ratio > 90%)
countries.