An abundance of valuable natural resources, such as oil, timber, gold, or diamonds, in a country has in recent years increasingly proven to be a cause for socio-economic and political instability rather than an engine for development. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the ‘resource...

We focus on three questions: one, what have been the quantitative dynamics and the main drivers of the global use of natural resources (energy and materials) in the past century? Two, how will these trends continue over the next decades, and what would be more sustainable scenarios? In other...

We establish a theoretical as well as empirical framework to assess the role of resource endowments and their geographic location for inter-State conflict. The main predictions of the theory are that conflict tends to be more likely when at least one country has natural resources; when the...

Between 1997 and 2014, US corn, soybean and cotton production almost fully converted to genetically modified crops. Starting around 2007, improved tight oil and shale gas technologies turned the declining US fossil fuel production into a booming industry. We study the effects of these two...

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the effect of natural resource rents on the process of economic liberalization and a potential moderating effect of the level of democracy. A simple political-economic model is developed in which the government in an autocratic country faces...