Fat-tailed commodity price innovations are well-documented in the literature and long recognized as disruptive for consumers and producers, yet little is known about what factors drive such extreme events. Utilizing a wide range of factors from the economics and finance literature and quantile...

Macro cross-country data and micro US county data indicate that resource rich regions have small and productive manufacturing sectors and large and unproductive non-manufacturing sectors. We suggest a process of specialization to explain these facts. Windfall revenue induces labor to move from...