We estimate the impacts of being connected to politicians on occupational choice.  We use an administrative dataset collected in 2008-2010 on 20 million individuals and rely on naming conventions to assess family links to candidates in elections held in 2007 and 2010.  We first estimate the...

Personality traits are highly predictive of life outcomes and successes.  However, little is known about their formation and what can hamper their development.  There is ample evidence that conditions in early-life can have persistent influence on health and cognitive skills.  In this paper,...

We show that rainfall, temperature, and commodity price shocks predict unrest in colonial French West Africa between 1906 and 1956.  We use a simple model of taxation and anti-tax resistance to explain these results.  In the colonial period, the response of unrest to economic shocks was...

We propose a simple structural model of the upstream sector in the oil and gas industry to study the determinants of costs with a focus on its relationship with the price of oil.  We use the real oil price, data on global drilling activity and costs of drilling to estimate a three-dimensional...

This paper examines the impact of the oil price boom in the 1970s and the subsequent bust on non-oil economic activity in oil-department countries.  During the boom, manufacturing value added and exports increased significantly relative to non-oil dependent countries, along with wages,...

Standard models often predict that people should either demand to save or demand to borrow, but not both.  We hypothesise instead that saving and borrowing among microfinance clients are substitutes, satisfying the same underlying demand: for a regular schedule of deposits and a lump-sum...

This paper studies how capital-scarce countries should manage volatile resource income.  Existing literature recommends that capital-scarce countries invest domestically, but that volatile resource income should be saved in a foreign sovereign wealth fund.  I reconcile these by combining a...

Climate policy requires that much of the world's reserves of fossil fuels remain unburned.  This paper makes the case for implementing this directly through policy to close the global coal industry.  Coal is singled out because of its high emissions intensity, low rents per unit value, local...

I use a randomised conditional cash transfer program from Indonesia to provide evidence on peer effects in consumption of poor households.  I combine this with consumption visibility data from Indonesia to examine whether peer effects in consumption differ by a good's visibility.  In line with...

We analyse intertemporal poverty in two important dimensions - income and nutrition - in less developed northwest China during 2000-2004.  A generalised recursive selection model is proposed which enables simultaneous estimation of the causes of intertemporal poverty within and between...