Can natural resource windfalls increase public debt in democracies? Adopting a political economy perspective, we show that the answer is in the affirmative. Resource windfalls increase both the government's income and wealth. The former mitigates the need to borrow, whereas the latter encourages...

In this work we examine how economic growth affects public debt when interacted with reelection prospects. Reelection considerations shorten political time horizons and give rise to political myopia that exacerbates debt accumulation. That laxer institutional reelection restrictions (e.g. no...

How do state tax rates respond to federal tax shocks? This paper presents a novel mechanism of heterogeneous vertical tax externalities across state-levels of fiscal advantage, showing that tax increases can be expansionary -- even without their reinvestment. States rich in natural resources...

Do reduced costs of factor mobility mitigate Dutch Disease effects, to the extent that they are reversed? The case of federations provides an indication they do. We observe Resource Blessing effects at the federal-state level (within federations) yet rather Resource Curse ones at the federal...

Can oil discovery shocks affect the demand for protectionism? An intertemporal model of Dutch disease indicates that if the tradable sector is politically dominant then an oil discovery can induce protectionism. If the economy is also credit constrained, this effect is intensified upon...

Is capital more complementary to one of the genders? More specifically, which types of capital are complementary to which gender? This paper presents a first attempt at estimating capital-gender complementarities, at both aggregated and disaggregated levels. By employing a panel of 12 OECD...

While there has been extensive research on the Dutch Disease (DD) very little attention, if any, has been devoted to the regional mechanisms through which it may manifest itself. This is the first empirical attempt to research a 'regional DD' by looking at the local and spatial impacts of...

We find that, in democratic regimes with unlimited reelection, the answer to the question posed above is in the affirmative, contrasting a widely held view. The reason is that resource windfalls increase future graft prospects, motivating opportunistic incumbents to postpone their planned...

Can oil discovery shocks affect the demand for protectionism? An intertemporal model of Dutch disease indicates that if the tradable sector is politically dominant then an oil discovery can induce protectionism. If the economy is also credit constrained, this effect is intensified upon...