This paper contributes to the growing political economy literature of within-country natural resources management, by proposing a new resource policy for the oil-rich southern Italian region of Basilicata. The policy proposal is to establish a (regional) wealth fund in which all the royalty...

To study the causal impact of oil royalties on human capital, we exploit quasi-experimental variation arising from a law in Ecuador that transfers resources to municipalities regardless of their oil-producing status. We find that royalties increase the likelihood of students completing primary...

This paper presents the first rigorous empirical evidence of the impact of a large hydrocarbon project in both its economic and environmental dimension. Concentrating on Peru’s largest hydrocarbon project, the Camisea Gas Project, which began operating in the dense Amazonian jungle under...

The empirical finding of an inverse U-shaped relationship between per capita income and pollution, the so-called Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), suggests that as countries experience economic growth, environmental deterioration decelerates and thus becomes less of an issue. Focusing on the...

We examine empirically the effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth. We find that natural resources have a negative impact on growth when considered in isolation, but a positive impact on growth when including in the analysis other variables such as corruption, investments,...

In this paper we document the stylized facts about the relationship between international oil price swings, sovereign risk and macroeconomic performance of oil-exporting economies. We show that even though being a bigger oil producer decreases sovereign risk–because it increases a...

We illuminate several important aspects of the nature and causes of growth and institutional change. To do this, we focus on the role resource pressures have played in the historic development of Hawaii's institutions. We discuss the Hawaiian story in the context of the natural co-evolution of...

This paper investigates the connection between resource abundance and innovation, as a transmission mechanism that can elucidate part of the resource curse hypothesis; i.e. the observed negative impact of resource wealth on income growth. We develop a variation of the Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans model...

Do resource-extraction booms crowd out postsecondary education? We explore this question by examining the higher education-related decisions of Chilean high school graduates during the 2000s commodities boom. We find mineral extraction increases a person's likelihood of enrolling in...

The existing studies on Green Paradox and stranded assets focus on dirty exhaustible assets (fossil fuel reserves) and show that environmental regulations, by changing the costs of dirty inputs relative to clean ones, lead to replacements of the former by the latter and stranding of dirty assets...