This article investigates the effect of natural resources on whether ethno-political groups choose to pursue their goals with non-violent as compared to violent means, distinguishing terrorism from insurgencies. It is hypothesized that whether or not the extraction of fossil fuels sparks...

We document that an oil price boom triggers dissatisfaction with one's income, and confirm that this is not driven by changes in real economic conditions. Unique data from Kazakhstan allows us to exploit time, sectoral and spatial variation to identify the impact of the recent oil boom on...

We empirically examine the impact of oil wealth on property rights protection for a sample of 156 countries between 1960 and 2014. We find that higher levels of oil wealth result in weaker private property rights. This result is robust to different instrumental-variable approaches and...

In this paper we examine the claim that natural resources invite civil conflict, and challenge the main stylized facts in this literature. We find that the nature of causation between resource dependence and civil war is opposite to conventional wisdom. In particular, (i) civil war creates...

This paper analyzes the nature of democratic development in a nation on the process of introducing nuclear power over the period 1960 - 2017 for an unbalanced panel of 171 countries. Given the involved political process of introducing nuclear power and its political importance, as well as the...

This paper conducts an empirical study of the factors that affect the spatial distribution of foreign direct investment (FDI) across regions in Russia; in particular, this paper is concerned with those regions that are endowed with natural resources and marketrelated benefits. Our analysis...

We study how natural-resource rents affect the risk of internal conflict within countries and how the federal structure of countries influences this relationship. Natural-resource abundance may induce excessive rent-seeking and thus increase the risk of internal conflict. Fiscal and political...

This paper studies empirically the relationship between oil endowment and the duration of autocratic leaders. A simple theoretical setting shows how the relationship between oil endowment and the duration of the dictatorial regime is mediated by the price of oil. Using a dataset on 106...

Due to the increasing European import dependency, significant additional natural gas volumes will be required. In addition to the Nord Stream pipeline, the Nabucco and South Stream pipeline are projects planned for the next decade to provide further gas supplies to the European market. As one of...