There is an increasing tension between the Iranian Government and the west on an increasingly likely European oil embargo and the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz. The main question is: What will happen to the international oil prices in the case of shocks in the flow of Iranian oil...

Resource-rich economies and ethnically divided societies are linked to higher income inequality at the macro level. Our goal is to empirically examine the income inequality and welfare effects of the direct distribution of resource rents and subsequent taxation in Iran. We use rich micro survey...

We develop a formal model that looks at the mutually endogenous determination of foreign direct investments in natural resource-rich countries, the decision of host governments to expropriate these investments, and the level of corruption. Higher resource production makes expropriation more...

One of the main elements of economic sanctions against Iran due to its nuclear and military programs is crude oil exportation restrictions in addition to investment in Iranian energy related projects. Senders of such sanction are interested in understanding the impacts of such embargos on...

This paper empirically analyzes the influence of rents from natural resources on the composition of government spending and investigates whether the relationship differs between democracies and autocracies. Both panel data and instrumental variable regressions suggest that there is a negative...

We study the short and long run responses of income inequality to the positive oil and gas rents per capita shocks in Iran from 1973 to 2012. Using vector autoregression (VAR)-based impulse response functions, we find a positive and statistically significant response of income inequality to oil...

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the effect of natural resource rents on the process of economic liberalization and a potential moderating effect of the level of democracy. A simple political-economic model is developed in which the government in an autocratic country faces...

This paper provides background information and basic descriptive statistics for a representative survey of the German population conducted on our behalf by GfK in the first quarter of 2013. The survey addresses important topics in fiscal policy, including: 1) public preferences on the...

Using a representative survey of the German population, this paper studies individual consumption responses to a recent payroll tax reduction. Our results show that 55% of the respondents spend the extra money, indicating considerable potential for tax changes to affect consumption and economic...

We study the influence of taxation on labour supply using a specifically designed representative survey of the German population. First, we investigate whether taxes generally matter for the labour supply decisions of our respondents. Around 41 per cent report taking taxes into consideration,...