We investigate effects of plausibly exogenous variation in the value of oil and natural gas production in local economies on self-employment in the United States. We find that self-employment is procyclical, i.e. self-employment increases during a business cycle expansion and is reduced during a...

A recently developed stochastic frontier production function methodology is used to estimate econometrically how technical efficiency, technological progress, and returns to scale contributed to US states’ economic growth in 1979-2000. Improved regional human capital data that are superior to...

This paper aims to explore the Spanish geographical dynamics of per capita income among provinces, during the period 1955-1997. First, we obtain some preliminary evidence of their behavior over time from the visual inspection of their non-parametric density distributions. These distributions...

We study the association between oil rents and tax revenues, highlighting the importance of the shadow economy as a mediating factor. We present a simple theoretical model demonstrating that decreasing oil rents are likely to be positively associated with the tax revenues in a country with a...

Unlike in Asia, the manufacturing sector has not (yet) become a driver of structural change in Africa. One common explanation is that the natural resource-focus of many African economies leads to Dutch disease effects. To test this argument for the case of newly found oil in Ghana we develop a...

We examine the response of the news-based Corruption Reflection Index (CRI) to positive shocks in oil revenues in Iran. Using annual data from 1962 to 2019, we employ the Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model and analyze impulse response functions. Our findings reveal a positive and significant...