Countries face both challenges and opportunities in using their extractive industries to achieve more inclusive development - particularly in the developing world. Yet while a large national income can result from resource wealth, it can also be associated with acute social inequality and deep...

Our goal is to show that contrary to the claims made in several recent papers, the effect of a large endowment of oil and other mineral resources on long-term economic growth of countries has been on balance positive. Moreover, the claims of a negative effect of oil and mineral wealth on the...

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...

We study the effect of the upsurge of natural resources income from the commodity price boom of the 2000s on the functional distribution of income. To do so, we build a general equilibrium model of Dutch disease that characterizes how natural resource windfalls affect equilibrium factor shares....

This paper is intended to demonstrate, in theory as well as empirically, how increased dependence on natural resources tends to go along with less rapid economic growth and greater inequality in the distribution of income across countries. On the other hand, public policy in support of education...

We provide cross-country evidence that rejects the traditional interpretation of the natural resource curse. First, growth depends negatively on volatility of unanticipated output growth independent of initial income, investment, human capital, trade openness, natural resource dependence, and...

This paper evaluates the impact of major natural resource discoveries since 1950 on GDP per capita and other economic and social indicators. Using panel fixed-effects estimation ad resource discoveries in countries that were not previously resource-rich, I find a positive effect on GDP per...

This paper is intended to demonstrate, in theory as well as empirically, how increased dependence on natural resources tends to go along with less rapid economic growth and greater inequality in the distribution of income across countries. On the other hand, public policy in support of education...

The problem of the relevance of human and natural capital, as well as the potential adverse effect of natural capital on economic growth, has gained increased attention in development economics. The aim of this paper is to assess, theoretically and empirically, the relevance of several forms of...

In this paper we document the stylized facts about the relationship between international oil price swings, sovereign risk and macroeconomic performance of oil-exporting economies. We show that even though being a bigger oil producer decreases sovereign risk–because it increases a...