Australia is experiencing its largest mining boom for more than a century and a half. This paper explores, from a national perspective, important economic differences that arise when a mining boom, such as the current one, is generated by export price increases (trading gains) rather than export...

The extent to which local communities benefit from commodity booms has been subject to wide but inconclusive investigations. This paper draws from a new district-level database to investigate the local impact on socioeconomic outcomes of mining activity in Peru, which grew almost twentyfold in...

In this paper, we study how mines change local societies in the Nordic countries with a particular focus on the Arctic region. Our study is based on register data at the municipality level from Norway, Sweden, and Finland for the period 1986 to 2013. The applied econometric model allows for...

A lack of job security is an increasingly prevalent characteristic of modern labour markets, and there is evidence that recent financial crises have exacerbated this issue. In this paper, we assess how exogenous changes in the macroeconomic environment affect workers' perceived job security, and...

This study on the economics of gender differences examines whether the mining industry acts as a blessing or curse for women's well-being and economic status. The analysis focuses on the impact of proximity to mineral deposits and active mines on various measures of women's agency and health in...

This paper examines how firms in an emerging economy are affected by violence due to drug trafficking. Employing rich longitudinal plant-level data covering all of Mexico from 2005 2010, and using an instrumental variable strategy that exploits plausibly exogenous spatiotemporal variation in the...

This paper analyzes causes of the low self-employment rates among Hispanics, which are nearly half of non-Hispanic white self-employment rates. Relatively little is known of the reason for the lower entrepreneurship rates among Hispanics, the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S. The paper...

To combat a growing obesity problem, Mexico imposed a nationwide tax on drinks with added sugar, popularly referred to as a "soda tax," effective January 2014. Since the tax took effect nationwide, there is no conventional control group that can be used as a baseline to estimate how the tax...

This paper investigates the relationship between the capital share in national income and personal income inequality over the long run. Using a new historical cross-country database on capital shares in 19 countries and data from the World Wealth and Income Database, we find strong long-run...

We study how a large household windfall affects sorting of relatively disadvantaged youth over high school tracks by exploiting the discontinuity in the assignment of a welfare program in Mexico. The in-cash transfer is found to significantly increase the probability of selecting vocational...