Many studies have found a negative relationship between oil abundance and democracy. However, recent tried to upend this correlation by employing time-series techniques or finding conditionality on other factors. This study contributes the literature an Arellano Bond model that corrects for fixed effects adopts new variables from empirical studies. Comparing Eurasia Latin America 1960s 2010, we...

A large body of literature has arisen in economics and political science analyzing the apparent “resource curse”—the tendency of countries with high levels of natural resources to exhibit worse economic and political outcomes. The author examines the purported causal mechanisms underlying this “curse” and shows that they all center on the revenue that these resources generate for the government...

We present a Stackelberg model of conflict, in which contestants have limited endowments to be put in two separate sectors, thus incorporating salient features of many conflicts. The model is applied to the case of conflict over natural resources. Consistent with amounting empirical evidence regarding a so-called ”resource curse”, we find that the relation between conflict intensity and resourc...

The existence of a natural resource curse has been a longstanding theme in the economic literature and in policy discussions. We propose an alternative mechanism and study its policy implications. The mechanism is based on the interaction between two building blocks: specialization in non-tradables and financial market imperfections. We show that if a country has a sufficiently large non-resour...

We examine the relevance of experimental findings from laboratory settings that abstract from the field context of the task that theory purports to explain. Using common value auction theory as our guide, we identify naturally occurring settings in which one can test the theory. Experienced agents bidding in familiar roles do not fall prey to the winner’s curse. Yet, experienced agents fall pre...

This note provides formal derivations of claims made in “The Political Economy of Natural Resource Funds” (Chapter 8 of Escaping the Resource Curse, New York: Columbia University Press). We provide a two period model in in which two individuals take turns in dividing a non-renewable asset. The problem is analogous to that facing countries endowed with a natural resource or other fund. Insecurit...