Do natural resources benefit producer economies, or is there a "Natural Resource Curse,"0 perhaps as the crowd-out of manufacturing productivity spillovers reduces long-term growth? We combine new data on oil and gas endowments with Census of Manufactures microdata to estimate how oil and gas...

This paper presents a novel methodology for estimating impacts on domestic supply of oil and natural gas arising from changes in the tax treatment of oil and gas production. It corrects a downward bias when the ratio of aggregate tax expenditures to domestic production is used to measure the...

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output-the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years. We first...

This paper analyzes the interaction between corporate taxes and corporate governance. We show that the characteristics of a taxation system affect the extraction of private benefits by company insiders. A higher tax rate increases the amount of income insiders divert and thus worsens governance...

This report examines how oil and gas production generates revenue for local governments in eight states through four key mechanisms: (i) state taxes or fees on oil and gas production; (ii) local property taxes on oil and gas property; (iii) leasing of state-owned land; and (iv) leasing of...

Does international trade affect the growth of cities, and vice versa? Assembling disaggregate data for four countries, we document a novel stylized fact: Export activity is disproportionately concentrated in larger cities - even more so than overall economic activity. We rationalize this fact by...

However, local productivity growth also has important general equilibrium effects through worker mobility. We estimate that 38% of the overall increase in workers' purchasing power occurs outside cities directly affected by local TFP growth. The indirect effects on worker earnings are...

Interstate Highway openings were permanent, anticipated demand shocks that increased gasoline demand and sometimes shifted it spatially. We investigate supply responses to these demand shocks, using county-level observations of service station counts and employment and data on highway openings'...

While significant work has been done to examine the determinants of regional development, there is little evidence on the contribution of air services toward this outcome. This paper exploits the unexpected market changes induced by the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act to bring new evidence on the...

Most analysts of the modern Latin American economy have held the pessimistic belief in historical persistence -- they believe that Latin America has always had very high levels of inequality, and that it's the Iberian colonists' fault. Thus, modern analysts see today a more unequal Latin America...