Understanding a Resource Curse Hypothesis: The Nigerian Archetype

The Resource Curse: A Statistical Mirage? Resources

A surprising feature of resource-rich economies is slow growth. It is often argued that natural-resource production impedes development by creating market or institutional failures. This paper establishes an alternative explanation a slow-growing resource sector. A declining resource sector is disproportionally re ected in resource-dependent countries but appears to have little a ect on the res...

The Natural Resource Curse: A Survey

It is striking how often countries with oil or other natural resource wealth have failed to grow more rapidly than those without. This is the phenomenon known as the Natural Resource Curse. The principle is not confined to individual anecdotes or case studies, but has been borne out in econometric tests of the determinants of economic performance across a comprehensive sample of countries. The ...

The Resource Curse: A Corporate Transparency Channel*

We propose and investigate a new channel through which the resource curse a stylized fact that countries rich in natural resources grow slower operates. Predatory governments are more likely to expropriate corporate profits in natural resource industries when the price of resources is higher. Corporations whose profits are more dependent on the price of resources can mitigate the risk of exprop...

The Resource Curse: A Corporate Transparency Channel *

The curse of the pharaoh hypothesis.

The 'curse of the pharaoh' has been used as a metaphor for the hypothesis that higher parasite propagule survival selects for higher virulence. Indeed, the mysterious death of Lord Carnavon after entering the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen could potentially be explained by an infection with a highly virulent and very long-lived pathogen. In this paper, I investigate whether parasite v...