For a country fractionalized in competing factions, each owning part of the stock of natural exhaustible resources, or with insecure property rights, we analyze how resources are transformed into productive capital to sustain consumption. We allow property rights to improve as the country...

Limiting global warming in line with the goals in the Paris Agreement will require substantial technological and behavioural transformations. This challenge drives many of the current modelling trends. This paper undertakes a review of 17 state-of-the-art recursive-dynamic computable general...

There is a large literature on the role infrastructure plays in economic development, but few papers document the causal effect of infrastructure on the sustainability of natural resources. We examine the effect of the arrival of two new national highways on ground water levels in a small...

Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17, respectively, indicating that the largest global cities in developing...

Limiting global warming in line with the goals in the Paris Agreement will require substantial technological and behavioural transformations. This challenge drives many of the current modelling trends. This paper undertakes a review of 17 state-of-the-art recursive-dynamic computable general...

Countries have made considerable efforts to diversify their energy sources from fossil fuels to renewables in the last two decades to achieve sustainable economic development. However, it is widely argued that the countries may experience sluggish economic development during the energy...

What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study “Sites and Services” projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during the 1970s and 1980s, half of which provided infrastructure in previously...

Africa’s interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in...

The commonly-used satellite images of nighttime lights fail to capture the true brightness of most cities. We show that night lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level, provided they are first corrected for top-coding. We present a stylized model of urban luminosity and...

What is the long run impact on development from differences in subsistence strategies during pre-industrial times? Whereas this question has been explored from the point of view of agriculture, remarkably little attention has been paid to the complementary strategy of relying on marine...