Author: Jim

Oil discoveries can constitute a major positive and exogenous shock to economic activity, but the resource curse hypothesis would suggest they might also be detrimental to growth over the long run. We utilize a new methodology for estimating growth under-performance to examine the extent to which discoveries depress the growth path of a country following a discovery and … Continue reading Evidence for a presource curse?

This article originally appears in Finance and Development, March 2017, IMF. Successful action to address climate change would diminish the value of fossil fuel resources in many of the world’s poorest countries To achieve climate change goals, the world must cut consumption of fossil fuels dramatically. But climate change success may put developing countries rich in … Continue reading Unburnable Wealth of Nations

Institutions and the location of oil exploration (2017) (with Torfinn Harding). Accepted, JEEA. We provide evidence that institutions strongly influence where oil and gas exploration takes place. At national borders, exploration companies drill on the side with better institutional quality two times out of three. To identify the effect of institutions, we utilise a global dataset … Continue reading Institutions and the location of oil exploration