Constitutions are commonly regarded as uniquely national products, shaped by domestic ideals and politics. This paper develops and empirically tests a novel hypothesis, which is that constitutions are also shaped by transnational influence, or “diffusion.” Constitutional rights can diffuse...

One of the most important recent innovations in financial markets has been the development of credit derivative products that allow banks to more actively manage their credit portfolios than ever before. We analyse the effect that access to these markets has had on the lending behaviour of a...

One of the most important recent innovations in financial markets has been the development of credit derivative products that allow banks to more actively manage their credit portfolios than ever before. We analyze the effect that access to these markets has had on the lending behavior of a...

Surprisingly little is known about the impact of natural resource booms on income inequality in resource rich countries (Ross, 2007). This paper develops a theory, in the context of a two sector growth model in which learning-by-doing drives growth, to explain the time path of inequality...

Those low-income countries that export non-agricultural commodities are in the midst of a resource transfer. It is undoubtedly the biggest opportunity for transformative development that these societies have experienced, dwarfing both aid and previous commodity booms. To get it in proportion, in...

This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries. Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem to...

Developing countries frequently face large adverse shocks to their economies. We study two distinct types of such shocks: large declines in the price of a country’s commodity exports and severe natural disasters. Unsurprisingly, adverse shocks reduce the short-term growth of constant-price GDP...

Currently, evidence on the ‘resource curse’ yields a conundrum. While there is much cross-section evidence to support the curse hypothesis, time series analyses using vector autoregressive (VAR) models have found that commodity booms raise the growth of commodity exporters. This paper adopts...