We investigate the Hartwick rule for saving of a nation necessary to sustain a constant level of private consumption for a small open economy with an exhaustible stock of natural resources. The amount by which a country saves and invests less than the marginal resource rents equals the expected...

Many resource-rich countries have poor economic performance and suffer from negative genuine saving rates, especially if they have many rival factions and badly functioning legal systems. We attempt to shed light on these stylized facts by analyzing a power struggle about the control of natural...

Natural and agricultural resources for which there is a substantial black market, such as coca, opium, and diamonds, appear especially likely to be exploited by the parties to a civil conflict. On the other hand, these resources may also provide one of the few reliable sources of income in the...

This paper presents a dynamic, two-region general equilibrium model in which inter-regional production and trade patterns are endogenously determined. Localized growth stems from geographical concentration of an industrial sector exhibiting permanent productivity increases. Geographical...

Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavorable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain,...

Evaluations of new infrastructure in developing countries typically focus on direct effects, such as the impact of an electrifification program on household energy use. But if new infrastructure induces people to move into an area, other local publicly provided goods may become congested,...

This paper studies the long run development of U.S. counties and metro areas from 1800 to 2000. In earlier periods smaller counties converge whereas larger counties diverge. Over time, due to changes in the age composition of locations and net congestion, convergence dissipates and divergence...

Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods and data. We survey a range of modelling traditions, and some formal approaches to the ’hard problem’ of regional economics, namely the joint consideration of agglomeration and...

This paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to commuting decisions, which...

This paper studies the recent spatial development of India. Services, and to a lesser extent manufacturing, are increasingly concentrating in high-density clusters. This stands in contrast with the United States, where in the last decades services have tended to grow fastest in medium-density...