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...

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...

The relationship between the abundance of natural resources and socio-economic performance has been a main object of study in the economic development field since Adam Smith. Dominated by the verification of the so called curse of natural resource, the mainstream literature on the topic has been...

This study proposes a new mechanism for the resource curse: crowding-out of innovation due to the existence of an option to engage in conflict. Using a game theoretical framework, it is argued that an increase in the amount of natural resources (in the informal sector here conflict for a...

This paper explores the impacts of oil exploitation on human capital accumulation at the local level in Colombia, a resource-rich developing country. We provide evidence based on detailed spatial and temporal data on oil exploitation and education, using the number of wells drilled as an...

The available evidence on the effects of aid on growth is notoriously mixed. We use a novel empirical methodology, a heterogeneous panel vector-autoregression model identified through factor analysis, to study the dynamic response of exports, imports, and per capita GDP growth to a global aid...