We use new data to examine the effects of giant oilfield discoveries around the world since 1946. On average, these discoveries increase per capita oil production and oil exports by up to 50 percent. But these giant oilfield discoveries also have a dark side: they increase the incidence of...

Do reduced costs of factor mobility mitigate Dutch Disease effects, to the extent that they are reversed? The case of federations provides an indication they do. We observe Resource Blessing effects at the federal-state level (within federations) yet rather Resource Curse ones at the federal...

This paper studies how capital-scarce countries should manage volatile resource income. Existing literature recommends that capital-scarce countries invest domestically, but that volatile resource income should be saved in a foreign sovereign wealth fund. I reconcile these by combining a...

This paper studies how monetary policy should optimally respond to an oil discovery.Oil discoveries provide news that the natural level of output will increase in the future. Anticipated increases in natural output lower the natural real interest rate. Optimal monetary policy must accommodate...

Do local populations benet from resource booms? How strong are market linkages between the mining sector and the regional economy? This paper exploits exogenous variation in mine-level pro duction volumes generated by the recent copper boom in Zambia to shed light on these questions.Using a...

In this paper we examine the claim that natural resources invite civil conflict, and challenge the main stylized facts in this literature. We find that the conventional measure of resource dependence is endogenous with respect to conflict, and that instrumenting for dependence implies that it is...

Foreign exchange windfalls such as those from natural resource revenues change non-resource exports, imports, and the capital account. We study the balance between these responses and, using data on 41 resource exporters for 1970-2006, show that the response to a dollar of resource revenue is,...

We use three different measures of fractionalization (with varying potential for members of one fraction to “mendaciously” pass for a member of another) to revisit the correlation between natural resources and the onset of conflict. The combination of ethnic fractionalization and resource...

In this paper we identify the effect of an oil price boom on households' satisfaction with income. In a natural experiment the increase in the oil price is used as an exogenous shock affecting households located in the oil and gas rich region of Kazakhstan. to evaluate the effect we use the...

One of the most important developments in international finance and resource economics in the past twenty years is the rapid and widespread emergence of the $6 trillion sovereign wealth fund industry. Oil exporters typically ignore below-ground assets when allocating these funds, and ignore...