We discuss political economy mechanisms which can explain the resource curse, in which an increase in the size of resource rents causes a decrease in the economy’s total value added. We identify a number of channels through which resource rents will alter the incentives of a political leader....

We use variation in oil output among Brazilian municipalities to investigate the effects of resource windfalls. We find muted effects of oil through market channels: offshore oil has no effect on municipal non-oil GDP or its composition, while onshore oil has only modest effects on non-oil GDP...

Poor countries are more heavily affected by extreme weather events and future climate change than rich countries. One of the reasons for this is the so-called adaptation deficit, that is, limits in the ability of poorer countries to adapt. This paper analyses the link between income and...

Theoretical models of growth and trade suggest that patterns of international specialization are dynamic and evolve endogenously over time. Initial comparative advantages are either reinforced or gradually unwound with the passage of time. This paper puts forward an empirical framework for...

This article develops a model of unemployment fluctuations. The model keeps the architecture of the general-disequilibrium model of Barro and Grossman (1971) but takes a matching approach to the labor and product markets instead of a disequilibrium approach. On the product and labor markets,...

A well known result is that the Gaussian log-likelihood can be expressed as the sum over different frequency components. This implies that the likelihood ratio statistic has a similar linear decomposition. We exploit these observations to devise diagnostic methods that are useful for...

When doing growth accounting, should we use ex post or ex ante measures of user costs to calculate the contribution of capital? The answer, based on a simple model of temporary equilibrium, is that ex post is better in theory. In practice researchers usually calculate ex post user costs by...

The aim of this paper is to survey the 'hard' evidence on the effects of subjective well-being. In doing so, we complement the evidence on the determinants of well-being by showing that human well-being also affects outcomes of interest such as health, income, and social behaviour. Generally, we...

We present a static model of aggregate demand and unemployment. The economy has a nonproduced good, a produced good, and labor. Product and labor markets have matching frictions. A general equilibrium is a set of prices, market tightnesses, and quantities such that buyers and sellers optimize...

This paper divides the population into two groups: the "inheritors" or "rentiers" (whose wealth is smaller than the capitalized value of their inherited wealth, i.e. who consumed more than their labor income during their lifetime); and the "savers" or "self-made men" (whose wealth is larger than...