Do local populations benet from resource booms? How strong are market linkages between the mining sector and the regional economy? This paper exploits exogenous variation in mine-level pro duction volumes generated by the recent copper boom in Zambia to shed light on these questions.Using a...

Countries restrict the export of natural resources to lower domestic prices, stimulate downstream industries, earn rents on international markets, or on environmental grounds. This paper provides empirical evidence of evasion of such export barriers. Using tools from the illicit trade...

Over the past decade, the production of shale oil and gas significantly increased in the United States. This paper uniquely examines how this energy boom has affected regional crime rates throughout the United States. There is evidence that, as a result of the ongoing shale-energy boom,...

The relatively new and still amorphous concept of "Green Growth" can be understood as a call for balancing longer-term investments in sustaining environmental wealth with nearer-term income growth to reduce poverty. We draw on a large body of economic theory available for providing insights on...

Foreign exchange windfalls such as those from natural resource revenues change non-resource exports, imports, and the capital account. We study the balance between these responses and, using data on 41 resource exporters for 1970-2006, show that the response to a dollar of resource revenue is,...

In this paper, I use an event study approach to investigate the claim that conflict minerals legislation in the United States (US) led to a ban on some mining exports from the Democratic Republc of the Congo (DRC), and that the passage of US regulation caused a ban on both production and trade...

An analytical framework predicts that, in response to an exogenous increase in resource based government revenue, a benevolent government will partially substitute away from taxing income, increase spending and save. Forty-two years of U.S. state-level data are consistent with this theory....

Previous studies imply that a positive regional fiscal shock, such as a resource boom, strengthens the desire for separation. In this paper we present a new and opposite perspective. We construct a model of endogenous fiscal decentralization that builds on two key notions: a trade-off between...

We use new data to examine the effects of giant oilfield discoveries around the world since 1946. On average, these discoveries increase per capita oil production and oil exports by up to 50 percent. But these giant oilfield discoveries also have a dark side: they increase the incidence of...