This paper examines the effect 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...

Does the distribution of income within a country become more equal as it grows richer? This paper uses plausibly exogenous variations in trade-weighted world income and international oil price shocks as instruments for within-country variations in countries' real GDP per capita to examine this...

This paper examines the role of monetary policy in fossil fuel exporters at different horizons. The main argument is that central banks in these economies need to look beyond the horizon of the business cycle. In the short run, (independent) monetary policy should flexibly target inflation. In...

This paper explores the interplay between concentration of wealth and policies, namely regulation and taxation. The paper exploits variation in exposure to international commodity prices. Using a global panel data set of the net worth of billionaires, the results point to a positive relationship...

We explore the effect of oil import price shocks on political outcomes using a worldwide dataset on elections of chief executives. Oil import price shocks cause a reduction in the odds of reelection of incumbents, an increase in media chatter about fuel prices, and an increase in non-violent...

This paper is the first to provide both theoretical and empirical evidence of farmlandglobalization whereby international investors directly acquire large tracts of agricultural landin other countries. A theoretical framework explains the geography of farmland acquisitionsas a function of...

This paper studies the optimal public investment decisions in countries experiencing a resource windfall. To do so, we use an augmented version of the Permanent Income framework with public investment faced with adjustment costs capturing the associated administrative capacity as well as...

We examine the behavior of expenditure policy during boom-bust in commodity price cycles, and its implication for real exchange rate movements. To do so, we introduce a Dutch disease model with downward rigidities in government spending to revenue shock. This model leads to a decoupling between...

This paper explores the dynamic effects of trade liberalization on tax revenue using a worldwide panel dataset. Results point to statistically significant negative effect of liberalization on (non- resource) tax revenues in the short term and no significant effect in the medium term....

The paper provides an alternative explanation for the "resource curse" based on the income effect resulting from high government current spending in resource rich economies. Using a simple life cycle framework, we show that private investment in the non-resource sector is adversely affected if...