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...

Credit derivatives allow for buying protection on corporate debt, but also on sovereign debt. In this paper we examine the implications for sovereign debt crises. We show that the availability of credit protection lowers ex-ante debtor moral hazard by allowing a bondholder to improve his...

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...