This article introduces an original panel dataset based on the text of country reports by the International Monetary Fund. It consists of a total of 5561 Article IV consultation and program review documents, published between 2004 and 2018 on 201 countries. The text of these reports provide...

This paper investigates the characteristics of resource-backed lending across sub-Saharan Africa. To shed light on this type of lending, the paper presents new information on thirty resource-backed loans identified through publicly available information between 2004-2018. These loans are...

This paper analyzes the factors affecting the speed at which newly discovered oil and gas fields are developed. Using data from over 25,000 oil and gas assets globally I demonstrate that both asset and country characteristics are critical in determining which assets reach production stage. I...

Africa's sovereign debt markets are not well understood, partly due to a lack of data. This paper introduces the Africa Debt Database (ADD), the most granular and comprehensive dataset on external borrowing by African governments thus far. Our project moves beyond existing aggregate datasets and...

The road from a petroleum discovery to production is long, especially in developing countries. On average they take 7 years with a standard deviation of 9 years and a quarter of the fields are yet to reach production. I analyze the drivers of petroleum project timelines using survival analysis...

How reliable are public debt statistics? This paper quantifies the magnitude, characteristics, and timing of hidden debt by tracking ex post data revisions across a comprehensive new database of more than 50 vintages of World Bank debt statistics. In a sample of debt data covering 146 countries...

Oil discoveries can constitute a major positive and exogenous shock to economic activity, but the resource curse hypothesis would suggest they might also be detrimental to growth over the long run. This paper utilizes a new methodology for estimating growth underperformance to examine the extent...

The road from a petroleum discovery to production is long, especially in developing countries. On average they take 7 years with a standard deviation of 9 years and a quarter of the fields are yet to reach production. I analyze the drivers of petroleum project timelines using survival analysis...

Can debt moratoria help countries weather negative shocks? We study the bond market effects of an official debt service suspension endorsed by the international community during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using daily data on sovereign bond spreads and synthetic control methods, we show that...