Much African land currently has low productivity and has attracted investors leasing land as a speculative option on higher future prices or productivity. To be beneficial land deals need to induce productivity enhancing investments. Some of these will be publicly provided (infrastructure,...

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...

In this article, we revisit Lipset’s law (Lipset 1959), which posits a positive and significant relationship between income and democracy. Using dynamic panel data estimation techniques that account for short-run cross-country heterogeneity in the relationship between income and democracy and...

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...

We study tax competition when pollution matters. Most notably we present a dynamic setting, where the supply of capital is endogenous. It is shown that tax competition may involve stricter environmental policy than the cooperative outcome.

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...

I develop a unique database of international fossil-fuel subsidies by examining country-specific patterns in carbon emission-to-GDP ratios, known as emission-intensities. For most - but not all - countries, intensities tend to be hump-shaped with income. I construct a model of...

We provide evidence that institutions strongly influence where investors drill for oil and gas. At national borders, investors drill on the side with better institutionalquality two times out of three. To identify the effect of institutions, we utilise a global data set on the location of...

One of the most important developments in international finance and resource economics in the past twenty years is the rapid and widespread emergence of the $6 trillion sovereign wealth fund industry. Oil exporters typically ignore below-ground assets when allocating these funds, and ignore...

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...