A growing empirical literature links natural resource abundance and "pointiness" to impeded economic growth and civil strife. We develop rent seeking and conflict models that capture the most salient features of contests for resource rents, and show how both resource abundance and geographical...

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the effect of natural resource rents on the process of economic liberalization and a potential moderating effect of the level of democracy. A simple political-economic model is developed in which the government in an autocratic country faces...

Despite the established link between oil rent fluctuations and remittances received, its plausible joint effect on economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains unexplored. To fill this gap, first we determine whether natural resource rent (composed of oil rent, forest rent and natural gas...

We analyze resource extraction in a political economy setting by introducing a political leader who optimizes both his own and the society's welfare function. We find that accounting for the private utility of a political elite, its higher discount factor and a different time horizon generally...

Geological constraints are considered in the context of a Hotelling type extraction-exploration model for an exhaustible resource. It is shown that such constraints, in combination with initially small reserves and strictly convex exploration costs, can coherently explain bellshaped peaks in...

The paper considers the process of discovery for subsoil resources, including both hard minerals and hydrocarbons and estimates its magnitude in recent years, as derived from the sum of extraction and changes in proven reserves. Spurred on by technology change and strong market conditions,...

This paper presents a simple model of resource extraction where preferences are household's preferences depend on relative consumption levels. We identify two dimensions along which consumption externalities distort the efficient extraction of resources: (i) the static trade-off between...