A surprising feature of resource-rich economies is slow growth.  It is often argued that natural-resource production impedes development by creating market or institutional failures.  This paper establishes an alternative explanation -  a slow-growing resource sector.  A declining resource...

This paper develops a model in which supply of a non-renewable resource can adjust through two margins: the rate of depletion and the rate of field opening.  Faster depletion of existing fields means that less of the resource can ultimately be extracted, and optimal depletion of open fields...

The Kenyan Constituency Development Fund (CDF) aims to alleviate poverty by allocating resources to constituencies which MPs and residents decide how to spend.  In this paper we assess whether MPs' re-election chances were affected by their management of the CDF.  For this purpose we analyse...

I develop and test two competing models assessing the impacts of targeted government transferson a local incumbent's electoral performance. I take advantage of the randomized roll-out of alarge-scale Conditional Cash Transfer program in the Philippines, which offers an ideal setting totest the...

Climate policy requires that much of the world's reserves of fossil fuels remain unburned.  This paper makes the case for implementing this directly through policy to close the global coal industry.  Coal is singled out because of its high emissions intensity, low rents per unit value, local...

We identify anthropogenic contributions to atmospheric CO2 measured at Mauna Loa using a statistical automatic model selection algorithm (Autometrics).  We find that vegetation, temperature and other natural factors alone cannot explain the trend or the variation in CO2 growth.  Industrial...

We present cross-country empirical evidence on the role of natural resources in explaining long-run differences in private investment as a share of GDP in a sample of 72 developing countries.  Our empirical results suggest important differences between oil and non-oil resources.  While revenue...

Africa is well endowed with potential for hydro and solar power, but its other endowments - shortages of capital, skills, and governance capacity - make most of the green options relatively expensive, while its abundance of hydro-carbons makes fossil fuels relatively cheap.  Current power...

We demonstrate major flaws in the statistical analysis of Beenstock, Reingewertz and Paldor (2012), discrediting their initial claims as to the different degrees integrability of CO2 and temperature.