This paper examines the growth experience of the Central Asian economies after the breakup of the Soviet Union. In particular, it evaluates the impact of being landlocked and resource rich. The main conclusions are: (1) Over the period 1994-2006, the landlocked resourcescarce developing...

We aim to explain petro populism - the excessive use of oil revenues to buy political support. To reap the full gains of natural resource income politicians need to remain in office over time. Hence, even a purely rent-seeking incumbent who only cares about his own welfare, will want to provide...

We reconsider the relationship between oil and conflict, focusing on the location of oil resources. In a panel of 132 countries over the period 1962-2009, we show that oil windfalls increase the probability of conflict in onshore-rich countries, while they decrease this probability in...

Several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough. We try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure, using alternative measures of both...

Does the central bank practice of publishing interest rate projections (IRPs) improve how market participants map new information into future interest rates? Using high-frequent data on Forward Rate Agreements (FRAs) we compute market forecast errors; differences between expected future interest...

The growth model perspective has provided avenues for bridging Comparative and International Political Economy, mainly with regard to the global financial crisis and developments within the Eurozone. This article aims to contribute to this endeavor by highlighting the joint effects of capital...

The sudden rise in land acquisitions in developing countries during the last decade has drawn the attention of scholars and think tanks. A set of recent papers by Deininger (2011), Deininger (2013), and Arezki et al. (2013) sought to understand the empirical determinants of the land rush. They...

We investigate whether the degree of energy dependency of countries influences their macroeconomic performance in terms of long-run growth. Specifically, we study whether the impact of energy price changes on economic growth differs depending on a country's degree of energy dependency. There are...

We construct a dynamic theory of civil conflict hinging on inter-ethnic trust and trade. The model economy is inhabitated by two ethnic groups. Inter-ethnic trade requires imperfectly observed bilateral investments and one group has to form beliefs on the average propensity to trade of the other...

The hypothesis of the natural resource curse has captivated the economics profession, and since the mid-1990s has generated a large body of policymaking initiatives aimed at dispelling the curse. In this paper, we evaluate how the effect of resource abundance on economic growth has changed since...