The 1990s ushered the world not only into a democracy wave, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, but also into a wave of Fiscal Rules, where the number of countries adopting this fiscal regime steadily rose from only 10 in 1990 to 97 in 2009. Countries that depend on hydrocarbons,...

In the two to five years immediately following end of conflicts, UN peacekeeping operations have succeeded in maintaining peace, while income and consumption growth rates have been higher than normal and recovery on key education and health indicators has been possible. Aid also has been...

Natural resources have been blamed for inducing slow growth and sparking civil conflicts and violence. This paper first develops a model to account for the hazard of armed civil conflicts as a manifestation of the natural resource curse which is mediated by the quality of both economic and...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on oil and other point-source resource curse. We find that the curse does exist but conditional on bad political governance. Unlike previous studies we estimate a flexible econometric growth model that accounts for long-term country...

Natural resources have been blamed for inducing slow growth and sparking civil conflicts and violence. This paper first develops a model to account for the hazard of armed civil conflicts as a manifestation of the natural resource curse, which is mediated by the quality of both economic and...

The authors combine an empirical model of external intervention, with a theoretical model of civil war duration. Their empirical model of intervention allows them to analyze civil war duration, using "expected" rather than "actual" external intervention as an explanatory variable in the duration...

A model of real exchange rate RER) determination is presented. The model permits long-run equilibrium movements in RER to be distinguished from its short-run disequilibrium dynamics. An important aspect of the model is that is explicitly considers the parallel market premium as one of the...

The most influential recent work on the determinants of civil wars found the factors associated with the grievance motivation to be largely irrelevant. Our paper subjects the results of this empirical work to further scrutiny by embedding the study of civil war in a more general analysis of...