We provide evidence that institutions strongly influence where investors drill for oil and gas. At national borders, investors drill on the side with better institutionalquality two times out of three. To identify the effect of institutions, we utilise a global data set on the location of...

Whether it is fair to characterize natural resource wealth as a curse is still debated. Most of the evidence derives from cross-country analyses, providing cases both for and against a potential resource curse. Scholars are increasingly turning to within-country evidence to deepen our...