This article examines the possible adverse effects of well-intended climate policies. A weak Green Paradox arises if the announcement of a future carbon tax or a sufficiently fast rising carbon tax encourages fossil fuel owners to extract reserves more aggressively, thus exacerbating global...

The optimal reaction to a productivity shock which becomes more imminent with global warming is to price carbon (proportional to the marginal hazard of a catastrophe) to curb the risk of climate change, but also to accumulate precautionary capital to facilitate smoothing of consumption and curb...

A rapidly rising carbon tax leads to faster extraction of fossil fuels and accelerates global warming. We analyze how general equilibrium effects operating through the international capital market affect this Green Paradox. In a two-region, two-period world with identical homothetic preferences...

Do local populations benet from resource booms? How strong are market linkages between the mining sector and the regional economy? This paper exploits exogenous variation in mine-level pro duction volumes generated by the recent copper boom in Zambia to shed light on these questions.Using a...

Countries restrict the export of natural resources to lower domestic prices, stimulate downstream industries, earn rents on international markets, or on environmental grounds. This paper provides empirical evidence of evasion of such export barriers. Using tools from the illicit trade...

We study tax competition when pollution matters. Most notably we present a dynamic setting, where the supply of capital is endogenous. It is shown that tax competition may involve stricter environmental policy than the cooperative outcome.

Over the past decade, the production of shale oil and gas significantly increased in the United States. This paper uniquely examines how this energy boom has affected regional crime rates throughout the United States. There is evidence that, as a result of the ongoing shale-energy boom,...

The relatively new and still amorphous concept of "Green Growth" can be understood as a call for balancing longer-term investments in sustaining environmental wealth with nearer-term income growth to reduce poverty. We draw on a large body of economic theory available for providing insights on...

The Arab Spring has led to very different outcomes across the Arab world. I present a highly stylized model of the Arab Spring to better understand these differences. In this model, dictators from the ethnic or religious majority group concede power if their country is oil-poor, but can stay in...

We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Uganda during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document large causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-05. We exploit two...