Although the relationship between natural resources and civil war has received much attention, little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Controversies and contradictions in the stylized facts persist because resource extraction is treated as exogenous while in reality fighting affects...

The political distortions in public investment projects are investigated within a bipartisan framework. The role of scrapping and modifying projects of previous governments receives special attention. The ruling party overspends on large ideological public investment projects and accumulates too...

If demand for human services is inelastic or manufactured goods are necessities, labour shifts from manufacturing to services and the budget share of services rises. Higher productivity growth in the market sector pushes up the tax rate and public employment if private goods and public services...

In the presence of Walrasian labor markets social policies harm hours worked, employment and output. In non-Walrasian labor markets with trade unions, efficiency wages and/or costly search and mismatch progressive taxation and corporatism induce wage moderation and boost employment and output....

Many resource-rich countries have negative genuine saving rates, so deplete their exhaustible natural resource wealth faster than they build up wealth in other assets. This phenomenon is stronger in more fractionalized countries with poor legal systems. We explain this by a power struggle about...

Discussions on problems in higher education in Europe typically focus on rising enrolment rates, access, governance, underperformance in research and teaching, lack of internationalisation, the lack of private and public funding. Our proposals for reform are based on more autonomy for...

The theory of tax smoothing and determination of public debt with uncertain future national income is extended for prudence. A prudent government deliberately underestimates future national income and the tax base, especially if the variance and persistence of shocks hitting the tax base are...

We criticise existing empirical results on the detrimental effects of natural resource dependence on the rate of economic growth after controlling for institutional quality, openness and initial income. These results do not survive once we use instrumental variables to correct for the endogenous...

Cross-country evidence is presented on resource dependence and the link between volatility and growth. First, growth depends negatively on volatility of unanticipated output growth independent of initial income per capita, the average investment share, initial human capital, trade openness, the...

Using the results of risk-adjusted linear-quadratic-Gaussian optimal control with perfect and imperfect observation of the economy, we obtain prudent Taylor rules for monetary policies and also allow for imperfect information and cautious Kalman filters. A prudent central bank adjusts the...