Big Data offer potential benefits for statistical modelling, but confront problems like an excess of false positives, mistaking correlations for causes, ignoring sampling biases, and selecting by inappropriate methods.  We consider the many important requirements when searching for a data-based...

A recent surge of literature on tax salience has included studies that use tax type as a proxy for salience.  The relationship between tax type and salience is not always apparent, however, nor is salience the only feature by which taxes differ.  In fact, taxes' behaviour over time suggests an...

Climate physics predicts that the intensity of natural disasters will increase in the future due to climate change.  One of the biggest challenges for economic modeling is the inherent uncertainty of climate events, which crucially affects consumption, investment, and abatement decisions.  We...

We study the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on optimum growth and climate policy by using an endogenous growth model with polluting non-renewable resources.  Climate change harms the capital stock.  Our main contribution is to introduce and extensively explore the naturally determined...

Over the past decade, the production of shale oil and gas significantly increased in the United States.  This paper uniquely examines how this energy boom has affected regional crime rates throughout the United States.  There is evidence that, as a result of the ongoing shale-energy boom,...

There is widespread concern that an international agreement on stringent climate policies will not be reached because it would imply too high costs for fast growing economies like China.  To quantify these costs we develop a general equilibrium model with fully endogenous growth.  The...

What is the optimal instrument design and choice for a regular attempting to control emissions by private agents in face of uncertainty arising from business cycles?  In applying Weitzman's result [Prices vs. quantities, Review of Economic Studies, 41 (1974), 477-491] to the problem of...

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...

This paper tests the theoretically founded hypothesis that the surge of SWF establishments is determined by three main factors: 1) the existence of natural resources profits, 2) the government structure and 3) the ability to invest usefully in the domestic economy.  We test this hypothesis on a...

Previous studies imply that a positive regional fiscal shock, such as a resource boom, strengthens the desire for separation.  In this paper we present a new and opposite perspective.  We construct a model of endogenous fiscal decentralization that builds on two key notions: a trade-off...