Persistent and significant privately-held stockpiles of crude oil have long been an important empirical regularity in the United States. Such stockpiles would not rationally be held in a traditional Hotelling-style model. How then can the existence of these inventories be explained? In the...

By convention, the petroleum industry relies on thermal equivalence to summarize the results of upstream oil and gas operations — measuring outputs in terms of barrels of “oil equivalent.” This despite the fact that the two commodities trade at nothing like thermal parity. Drawing on a...

This paper investigates how the devolution of oil windfalls affects the likelihood of political violence. It shows that transferring large shares of oil wealth can prevent conflict, while transferring small shares can trigger it. Among the different transfer schemes, fiscal transfers (to...