The so called resource curse, the fact that countries rich in natural resources often show lower rates of economic growth compared to resource-poor countries, is commonly attributed to the low quality of governance in resource-rich countries. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative...

The so called resource curse, the fact that countries rich in natural resources often show lower rates of economic growth compared to resource-poor countries, is commonly attributed to the low quality of governance in resource-rich countries. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative...

In this paper we investigate whether the design of World Bank conditionality, namely the extent of trade liberalization conditions, is influenced by the commercial motives of the Bank’s five major shareholders. Using a newly available dataset on World Bank conditionality we analyze the...

We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973-2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and – less robustly – commercial motives matter. When we relate geo-strategic and commercial motives to the political...

We experimentally study behavior in a finitely repeated coalition formation game played in real time. Subjects interact in groups of three, bargaining over the distribution of payments which occur at regular time intervals. During a given interval, payments occur if and only if a majority is in...

Erat and Gneezy (2012) conduct an experiment to test whether people avoid lying in a situation where doing so would lead to a Pareto improvement. They conclude that many people exhibit such a "pure lie aversion." I argue that the experiment does not provide a reliable test for such an aversion,...

The success of global climate policies over the coming decades depends on the diffusion of 'green' technologies. This requires that international environmental agreements (IEAs) and trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) interact productively.Using a simple and tractable model, we...

We investigate the relationship between long-term U.S. stock market risks and the macroeconomic environment using a two component GARCH-MIDAS model. Our results provide strong evidence in favor of counter-cyclical behavior of long-term stock market volatility. Among the various macro variables...

Using a modified DCC-MIDAS specification, we endogenize the long-term correlation between crude oil and stock price returns with respect to the stance of the U.S. macroeconomy. We find that variables which contain information on current and future economic activity are helpful predictors for...