This paper develops a long run growth model for a major oil exporting economy and derives conditions under which oil revenues are likely to have a lasting impact. This approach contrasts with the standard literature on the "Dutch disease" and the "resource curse", which primarily focus on short...

This study examines how the quality of political institutions affects the distribution of the government budget in Iran. We first introduce a mechanism through which democracy can shift government expenditure from national defense (military) to productivity-enhancing public spending (e.g.,...

This paper investigates the global macroeconomic consequences of country-specific oil-supply shocks. Our contribution is both theoretical and empirical. On the theoretical side, we develop a model for the global oil market and integrate this within a compact quarterly model of the global economy...

This paper examines the impact of oil revenues on the Iranian economy over the past hundred years, spanning the period 1908-2010. It is shown that although oil has been produced in Iran over a very long period, its importance in the Iranian economy was relatively small up until the early 1960s....

Our goal is to examine the income inequality and welfare effects of the direct distribution of resource rents and subsequent taxation in Iran. We use rich micro survey data covering more than 36,000 Iranian households in 2009. Our micro-simulations show that the direct distribution of resource...

This study examines how quality of political institutions affects the distribution of government budget and how development of government spending in major sections shapes the political institutions in Iran. This question has become especially important due to recent international sanctions,...

This study investigates the main causes and consequences of import and export smuggling and estimates the relative index of smuggling in Iran from 1970 to 2002. The Multiple Indicators - Multiple Causes (MIMIC) econometric modelling is used for a comprehensive analysis of the latent variable of...

We study the effect of a corruption reflection index on internal conflict in Iran using a novel measure of corruption based on newspaper coverage. We use the Vector Autoregression (VAR) model and its applied tools of impulse response and variance decomposition analyses to track the response of...

Existing research has pointed to the decreasing effect of revolutions and wars on income inequality. It is unclear whether this reduction is the result of ongoing changes within countries before revolutions and wars or if the results are standalone effects. In this study, we focus on the case of...