Can natural resource windfalls increase public debt in democracies? Adopting a political economy perspective, we show that the answer is in the affirmative. Resource windfalls increase both the government's income and wealth. The former mitigates the need to borrow, whereas the latter encourages...

We find that, in democratic regimes with unlimited reelection, the answer to the question posed above is in the affirmative, contrasting a widely held view. The reason is that resource windfalls increase future graft prospects, motivating opportunistic incumbents to postpone their planned...

In economies with multi-level governments, why would a change in the fiscal rule of a government in one level lead to a fiscal response by a government in a different level? The literature focused primarily on the standard common-pool problem, while giving little attention to the potential role...

Welfare measures under threats of environmental catastrophes are studied using the "“parable”" apparatus of Weitzman and Lofgren [22]. The occurrence probability of the catastrophic event is driven (at least partly) by anthropogenic activities such as natural resource exploitation. Without...

Unintended consequences of a pre-announced climate policy have been studied in a variety of situations. We show that early announcement of a carbon tax gives rise to a 'Green-Paradox', in that it increases polluting emissions in the interim period (between announcement and actual...