This paper provides evidence of the causal impact of oil discoveries on development. Novel data on the drilling of 20,000 oil wells in Brazil allows us to exploit a quasi-experiment: Municipalities where oil was discovered constitute the treatment group, while municipalities with drilling but no...

This paper studies the effect of financial repression and contract enforcement on entrepreneurship and economic development. We construct and solve a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents, occupational choice and two financial frictions: intermediation costs and financial contract...