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...

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...

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 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...

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.

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...

The literature on carbon leakage has not yet benefitted from many of the insights of the ‘New Economic Geography’ (NEG).  Most studies assume both an absence of agglomeration forces and that factors do not move inter-regionally.  This paper develops a 2-region NEG model with...

We review evidence regarding the size and evolution of the "land rush" in the wake of the 2007-2008 boom in agricultural commodity prices and study determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agricultural investment. Using data on bilateral investment relationships to estimate...

The spatial distribution of oil is determined by natural geography alone. However, we show that the distribution of oil exploration is affected by the quality of countries’ institutions. A global data set on the precise location of oil wells and national borders allows for a regression...