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...

Industria imports oil, produces final goods and wishes to mitigate global warming. Oilrabia exports oil and buys final goods from the other country. Industria uses the carbon tax to impose an import tariff on oil and steal some of Oilrabia’s scarcity rent. Conversely, Oilrabia has monopoly...

Whether it is fair to characterize natural resource wealth as a curse is still debated. Most of the evidence derives from cross-country analyses, providing cases both for and against a potential resource curse. Scholars are increasingly turning to within-country evidence to deepen our...

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...

Intergenerational funds smooth expected consumption across generations in face of an oil windfall. Precautionary buffers or liquidity funds cope with oil price volatility and are a politically more acceptable alternative to hedging. The magnitude of these buffers depends on the volatility of oil...

The Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz model of capital accumulation and resource depletion poses the following sustainability problem: is it feasible to sustain indenitely a level of consumption that is bounded away from zero? We provide a complete technological characterization of the sustainability...

The principles of how best to manage the various components of national wealth are outlined, where the permanent income hypothesis, the Hotelling rule and the Hartwick rule play a prominent role. As far as managing natural resource wealth is concerned, a case is made to use an intergenerational...

Natural resource abundance is a blessing for some countries, but a curse for othes. We show that differences across countries in the degree of fiscal decentralisation can contribute to this divergent outcome. First, the paper presents a unified theory that combines political and market...

The paper studies the long-run effects of shocks to resource rents on the economy using a structural vector error correction model for 37 developing countries. First, the long-run relations involving resource rents and the economy differ for resource importers and exporters. Second, there is an...

Mine-related transport infrastructure specializes in connecting mines to the coast, and not so much to neighboring countries. This is most clearly seen in developing countries, whose transport infrastructure was originally designed to facilitate the export of natural resources in colonial times....