Although most aid projects are aimed at local development, most research on the aid-conflict nexus is based on the country-year as unit of analysis. In contrast, this study examines the link between aid commitments and conflict intensity at the local level for three African countries between...

Recent studies have found that resource-rich low-income countries are better off investing their resource revenues domestically rather than saving them abroad in a sovereign wealth fund (SWF). This paper finds an optimal rule-based policy of accumulating public capital and its associated public...

Do Special Economic Zones (SEZs) increase local economic activities in developing countries? This paper explores this question by examining the aggregate district economic effects of SEZs, a place-based development policy in Ethiopia. The study relies on time and district variation in the...

This paper compares two alternative growth paths, assessing the effects on productivity of specialisation in natural resources (NR) and in technologically advanced products. The empirical analysis exploits product-level export data for 109 developing and 51 developed economies over the period...

The economic effects of global warming have gained considerable attention in recent economic literature. However, the interaction between desertification and agricultural productivity has not received substantial consideration. In this paper, we explore the relationship between soil...

This study provides an estimation of the causal relationship between the reduction in malaria transmission and farmer agricultural productivity. Exploiting exogenous geographic variations in the stability of malaria and using historical disaggregated county data for the US together with a robust...

Being rich of crucial minerals might be a leading determinant of local economic development. On the other hand, intensive extraction might prove to negatively affect the health and wealth of people living close to mineral deposits and the surrounding environment. I examine the effects that local...

This paper models export diversification in the context of an abundance of natural resources by decomposing the relative Theil index. On a sample of 160 countries from 1996 to 2018 we document that 74% of the high export concentration typical of the initial stage of development is driven by the...