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...

Natural resources have driven both growth and conflict in modern Africa. We model the interaction of parties engaged in potential conflict over such resources. The likelihood of conflict depends on both the absolute and relative resource endowments of the parties. Resources fuel conflict by...

We discuss the relationship between a resource-rich developing country and a multi-national corporation (MNC) that is developing its resources for the international market. We model the connections between transparency, permeability (defined as the amount of resource rent that leaves the...

One of the pervasive issues in social and environmental research has been to improve the quality of socioeconomic data in developing countries. Because of the shortcoming of standard data sources, the present study examines luminosity (measures of nighttime lights) as a proxy for standard...

What have we learned from the outpouring of literature as a result of the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change? A lot. We have explored the model space and the parameter space much more thoroughly, though there are still unexplored regions. While there are aspects of the Stern...

This paper highlights the importance of natural resource concentration and ethnic group regional concentration for ethnic conflict. A new type of bargaining failure due to multiple types of potential conflicts (and hence multiple threat points) is identified. The theory predicts war to be more...