This paper examines the effects that windfalls from international commodity price booms have on net foreign assets in a panel of 145 countries during the period 1970-2007. The main finding is that windfalls from international commodity price booms lead to a significant increase in net foreign...

In the 1990s the mainstream consensus was that trade causes growth. Subsequent research shed doubt on the consensus view, as evidence suggested that the identification of the effect of trade on growth was problematic in the existing literature. This paper contributes to this debate by focusing...

In 2009 the Australian government delivered approximately $8 billion in direct payments to households. These payments were pre- announced and randomly allocated to households based on postal codes over a 5-week period. We exploit this random allocation to estimate the causal response of...