This paper highlights the importance of natural resource concentration and ethnic group regional concentration for ethnic conflict. A new type of bargaining failure due to multiple types of potential conflicts (and hence multiple threat points) is identified. The theory predicts war to be more...

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...

The resource curse hypothesis relies on the resource-rich countries tendency to grow slower than resource-poor countries. Focusing on forest issues, this paper extends the resource curse hypothesis to environmental degradation: how do forest endowment and forest harvesting affect deforestation?...

It has often been argued that countries that produce natural resources mobilize less non-resource tax revenues than other countries. In this paper, we exploit the exogenous variation in the timing of giant oilfield discoveries to estimate the causal impact of natural resources on taxation. The...

We examine empirically the direct and indirect effects of natural resource abundance on economic growth. Natural resources have a negative impact on growth if considered in isolation, but a positive direct impact on growth if other explanatory variables, such as corruption, investment, openness,...

This study examines indicators of human capital accumulation together with data for natural resource abundance and rents in a panel of 102 countries running from 1970 to 1999. Mineral wealth makes a positive and marked difference on human capital accumulation. Matching on observables reveals...

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...

We reconsider the relationship between oil and conflict, focusing on the location of oil resources. In a panel of 132 countries over the period 1962-2009, we show that oil windfalls increase the probability of conflict in onshore-rich countries, while they decrease this probability in...

We reconsider the relationship between oil and conflict, focusing on the location of oil resources. In a panel of 132 countries over the period 1962-2009, we show that oil windfalls increase the probability of conflict in onshore-rich countries, while they decrease this probability in...