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...

We study whether the spatial distribution of natural resources across different ethnic groups within countries impede spatial inequality, national economic performance, and the incidence of armed conflict. By providing a theoretical rent-seeking model and analysing a set of geocoded data for...

Between 1997 and 2014, US corn, soybean and cotton production almost fully converted to genetically modified crops. Starting around 2007, improved tight oil and shale gas technologies turned the declining US fossil fuel production into a booming industry. We study the effects of these two...

Because excessive specialization can be risky, diversification matters for sustainable development. A case study of Madagascar, this paper begins by briefly discussing economic and institutional diversification and presenting a simple model of production possibilities to illuminate the possible...

This paper presents a two-sector green endogenous growth model to explore a mechanism that explains why carbon-intensive capital is not necessarily shut down during transition to a green economy. Without accumulating clean capital to offset carbon emissions, a tightening of climate regulation...

Fossil fuels have shaped the European economy since the industrial revolution. We use new long-run panel data to analyse the effect of both, coal and oil on economic growth between 1900 and 2015, exploiting variation at the level of European NUTS2 and NUTS3 regions. We show that the reversal of...

The aggregate economic impact of any developmental project depends on its effects within the chosen administrative region as well as its economic spillovers into other regions. However, little is known about how these spillovers propagate through geographic, ethnic and road networks. In this...

Rational choice theories assume that voters accurately assess the outcomes of policies. However, many important policies—such as regulating prices and introducing Pigouvian taxation—yield outcomes through indirect or equilibrium effects that may differ from their direct effects. Citizens may...

This essay reviews the relationship between natural-resource abundance and economic growth around the world, and presents some new results. The principal reasons why resource-based production can inhibit economic growth over long periods are traced to the Dutch disease, neglect of education,...

The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development, controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital, investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over a wide range of...