Natural and agricultural resources for which there is a substantial black market, such as coca, opium, and diamonds, appear especially likely to be exploited by the parties to a civil conflict. Even legally traded commodities such as oil and timber have been linked to civil war. On the other...

Using panel data and GMM estimators we find that conflict and less developed countries (LDCs) natural resources have a positive and significant impact on GDP in the developed countries (DCs), while the lagged value of the conflict coefficient has a negative and significant impact on GDP in the...

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 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...

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 document that an oil price boom triggers dissatisfaction with one's income, and that this dissatisfaction is independent of the effect of the boom on real economic conditions. Unique data from Kazakhstan allows us to exploit time, sectoral and spatial variation to identify the impact of the...

Major oil and gas discoveries are often associated with excitement and jubilation among citizens and government officials. But the extent to which discoveries substantially alter citizen expectations about economic conditions in a country remains an open question. The paper combines...

Despite repeated attempts to model conflict as contests over rent, few researchers have found a persuasive identification strategy to test these models. However, Lei and Michaels (2014) find that exogenous discoveries of “giant” oil fields are in fact associated with increased likelihood of...

Despite a growing literature on the natural resource curse, existing studies are sparse on how real effective exchange rate, political stability and corruption shape the relationship between natural resources and tourism revenues. This study analyses both the direct and indirect effects of...