How can citizens be motivated to demand accountability in the management of public revenues? We carry out a video survey experiment among 2300 Ghanaian respondents to study the impact of information provision and role models on attitudes and demand for accountability in the management of...

The governance of natural resource wealth is a key factor in promoting strong institutions and economic development in resource-rich countries. In this paper, we explore how individuals' engagement in local natural resource revenue (NRR) management can be enhanced and encouraged. We focus on...

This paper examines the impact of oil on economic growth in transition economies of the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. I use oil production and reserves data in a series of panel estimations to show that oil has had positive growth effects between 1990-2006, although they...

In this paper we challenge the conventional view that strikes are caused by asymmetric information regarding firm profitability such that union members are uninformed. Instead, we build an expressive model of strikes where the perception of unfairness provides the expressive benenifit of voting...

We examine how local governments’ political alignment with central government affects subnational fiscal outcomes. In theory, alignment could be rewarded with more intergovernmental transfers, or swing voters in unaligned constituencies could be targeted instead. We analyze data from Ghana,...

We present a new dataset that tracks changes in legal ownership regimes in the petroleum sector between 1867 and 2008 for a panel of countries. We document that foreign ownership has been taken over by partnerships as the leading ownership regime, while domestic ownership is on the rise again in...