This paper empirically investigates banks' investment allocations over the recent business cycle. I identify unsolicited deposit shocks resulting from unconventional energy development and estimate bank allocations of these deposits. In the pre-recession period, banks lend 38 percent of...

We present a simple model of petroleum exploration and development that can be applied to study the performance of alternative tax systems and identify potential distortions. Although the model is a highly simplified, it incorporates many factors and some of the key tradeoffs that would...

According to conventional wisdom, strategic natural resources like oil are harmful to international peace. Nonetheless, there is little empirical quantitative work on the link between resource abundance and interstate conflicts. Analyzing the impact of oil on militarized interstate disputes on a...