This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output - the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years.  We first...

I develop a unique database of international fossil-fuel subsidies by examining country-specific patterns in carbon emission-to-GDP ratios, known as emission-intensities.  For most but not all countries, intensities tend to be hump-shaped with income.  I construct a model of...

Demand for oil is very price inelastic.  Facing such demand, an extractive cartell induces the highest price that does not destroy its demand, unlike the conventional Hotelling analysis: the cartel tolerates ordinary substitutes to its oil but deters high-potential ones.  Limit-pricing...

This paper evaluates whether immigration can mitigate the Dutch disease effects associated with booms in natural resource sectors.  We derive predicted changes in the size of the non-tradable sector from a small general-equilibrium model a la Obstfeld-Rogoff.  Using data for Canadian...

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...