This paper investigates the dynamic impact of natural resource discoveries on government debt sustainability. We use a 'natural experiment' framework in which the timing of discoveries is treated as an exogenous source of within-country variation. We combine data on government debt, fiscal...

The permanent income hypothesis implies that frictionless open economies with exhaustible natural resources should save abroad most of their resource windfalls and, therefore, feature current account surpluses. Resource-rich developing countries (RRDCs), on the other hand, face substantial...

The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with endogenous entry of political candidates. The evidence...

One of the surprising features of modern economic growth is that economies with abundant natural resources have tended to grow less rapidly than natural-resource-scarce economies. In this paper we show that economies with a high ratio of natural resource exports to GDP in 1971 (the base year)...

The "fairness" of negotiations between countries and resource extracting firms is subject to many accusations and counter-accusations and may be argued, in many instances, to impact the subsequent economic benefit to a host country from extraction. This paper examines the role of host country...

We study theoretically and empirically whether natural resource windfalls affect political regimes. We document the following regularities. Natural resource windfalls have no effect on the political system when they occur in democracies. However, windfalls have significant political consequences...

We identify key factors, from large set of potential determinants, that explain the variation in export diversification across countries and over time using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA), which addresses model uncertainty and ranks factors in order of importance vis-a-vis their explanatory...

This paper uses a newly constructed revenue dataset of 35 resource-rich countries for the period 1992-2009 to analyze the impact of expanding resource revenues on different types of domestic (non resource) tax revenues. Overall, we find a statistically significant negative relationship between...

Rising income inequality has emerged as a major policy issue facing policymakers, but there is a dearth of empirical work on inequality in small states, including the Caribbean. Despite data limitations, the empirical analysis using a sample of small states finds that increased openness and...