We show that the incorporation of offshore entities increases when oil and gas exploration licences are awarded. We exploit leaked data on the incorporation of shell companies and detailed information on tax havens and the awarding rounds of oil licences to construct a new data set covering 119...

The empirical evidence suggests that the resource rich countries tend to have poor economic perfor- mance and higher rent seeking. In this paper, we develop a general equilibrium model explaining why natural resources turn out to be a curse in an economy divided into two classes: elite and...

Recent research shows that natural resources can hurt institutions by promoting corruption and diverting resources from the production of public goods. This, in turn, may have implications for the trust individuals hold for their governments. We explore this possibility by linking survey data on...

This paper considers a model with three overlapping generations of which only the middle one is able to work. There is a trade-off between food and bio-fuel pro- duction. We try to study this trade-off, its influence on economic growth and on resource consumption. The paper should state that...

This paper considers a model with three overlapping generations of which only the middle one is able to work. There is a trade-off between food and bio-fuel pro- duction. We try to study this trade-off, its influence on economic growth and on resource consumption. The paper should state that...

This paper considers a model with three overlapping generations of which only the middle one is able to work. There is a trade-off between food and bio-fuel pro- duction. We try to study this trade-off, its influence on economic growth and on resource consumption. The paper should state that...

This paper compares two alternative growth paths, assessing the effects on productivity of specialisation in natural resources (NR) and in technologically advanced products. The empirical analysis exploits product-level export data for 109 developing and 51 developed economies over the period...

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...

Africa's interior-to-coast roads are well suited to export natural resources, but not to support regional trade. Are they the optimal response to geography and comparative advantage, or the result of suboptimal political distortions? We investigate the political determinants of road paving in...