We develop a dynamic discrete choice model of a self-interested and unchecked ruler making decisions regarding the exploitation of a resource-rich country. This dictator makes the recursive choice between either investing domestically to live off the productivity of the country while facing the...

We provide new evidence on the causal effect of higher education on mortality. Our empirical strategy exploits the reduction in college openings introduced by the Pinochet regime after the 1973 coup in Chile, which led to a sharp downward kink in college enrollment among those cohorts reaching...

The analysis finds that in addition to U-shaped paths of environmental quality arising for growth in income per capita, growth in population can also produce socially efficient patterns that are U-shaped. Sufficient conditions for both types of paths are identified for a range of models and...

"We show that much of the recent reported decrease in interstate migration is a statistical artifact. Before 2006, the Census Bureau's imputation procedure for dealing with missing data inflated the estimated interstate migration rate. An undocumented change in the procedure corrected the...

This article studies how demography affects the outcome of the environmental policy in a macro-economic perspective, incorporating age-earning profiles in an OLG model à la Blanchard (1985) to capture the age structure effect of the demographic shocks. It first demonstrates, conversely to...