Optimal climate policy is studied in a Ramsey growth model with exhaustible oil reserves, an infinitelyelastic supply of renewables, stock-dependent oil extraction costs and convex climate damages. Weconcentrate on economies with an initial capital stock below that of the steady state of the...

The optimal social cost of carbon is in general equilibrium proportional to GDP if utility is logarithmic, production is Cobb-Douglas, depreciation in 100% every period, climate damages as fraction of production decline exponentially with the stock of atmospheric carbon, and fossil fuel...

The prescription of optimally managing natural resource revenue windfalls by smoothing consumption across generations using an intergenerational sovereign wealth fund that only invests in foreign assets is not appropriate for resource-rich developing economies. It is better for these economies...

Over the last few decades, integrated assessment models (IAM) have provided insight into the relationship between climate change, economy, and climate policies. The limitations of these models in capturing uncertainty in climate parameters, heterogeneity in damages and policies, have given rise...

Official forecasts for oil revenues and the burden of pensioners are used to estimate forward-looking fiscal policy rules for Norway and compared with permanent-income and bird-in-hand rules. The results suggest that fiscal reactions have been partial forward-looking with respect to the rising...

For a country fractionalized in competing factions, each owning part of the stock of natural exhaustible resources, or with insecure property rights, we analyze how resources are transformed into productive capital to sustain consumption. We allow property rights to improve as the country...

Most evidence for the resource curse comes from cross-country growth regressions suffers from a bias originating from the high and ever-evolving volatility in commodity prices. This paper addresses these issues by providing new cross-country empirical evidence for the effect of resources in...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a 'red herring' once one corrects for endogeneity of resource exports and allows resource abundance affect growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer significant while the value of...

Are natural resources a 'curse' or a 'blessing'? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource...

The effects of stochastic oil demand on optimal oil extraction paths and tax, spending and government debt policies are analyzed when the oil demand schedule is linear and preferences quadratic. Without prudence, optimal oil extraction is governed by the Hotelling rule and optimal budgetary...