The UAE is blessed with vast deposits of oil and gas. Contrary to other oil-rich economies, the UAE seems to have escaped from the so-called “oil curse”. We study how the UAE used resource rents to achieve economic development and provide higher welfare for the local population. We identify,...

This paper addresses the following questions on the political economy of distribution and growth in Chile. How does Chile compare to the world in government size, income distribution, and per capita GDP? Which is the relation between income distribution, government size and structure, and growth...

Natural resources have been blamed for inducing slow growth and sparking civil conflicts and violence. This paper first develops a model to account for the hazard of armed civil conflicts as a manifestation of the natural resource curse which is mediated by the quality of both economic and...

This paper contributes to the empirical literature on oil and other point-source resource curse. We find that the curse does exist but conditional on bad political governance. Unlike previous studies we estimate a flexible econometric growth model that accounts for long-term country...

This paper asks the question as to whether the choice of the exchange rate regime matters for post-conflict economic recovery and macro stabilization. Though an important aspect of the macroeconomic agenda for post-conflict, it has however, been largely ignored by the literature. We identify...

Dollarization brought economic stability to Ecuador and higher economic growth. The labor market has not reacted accordingly and unemployment rates remain stubbornly around 10%. I use a simple econometric model of the labor market to disentangle the impact on employment of GDP growth, real...