In this paper I investigate the competitiveness explanation of the resource curse: to what extent slow growth in primary producer countries is related to the properties of this pattern of trade specialization. To address this hypothesis that has not been adequately explored in the literature, I...

This paper examines the effect of natural resource dependence on growth in a cross-country setting during 1970 to 2010, first accounting for the effect of resource export dependence on institutional development. We employ several political and governance indicators, numerous econometric...

We systematize recent macroeconomic empirical literature on the direct and indirect impact of natural disasters providing a meta-analysis of 20 studies published during 2002-2013. We show that the disagreement between these studies is caused by the empirical design, the estimation technique and...