Battlefields and Marketplaces

Divided societies in the developing world experience wasteful struggles for power. We study the relationship between political stability and resources wasted in the struggle within a model of competitive power contests. The model of power contests is similar in structure to models describing oligopolistic market competition. This analogy helps us in deriving results that are new to the conflict literature. We show, for example, that the Herfindahl-Hirschman index can be interpreted as a measure of power concentration and that a peace treaty between fighting groups have a parallel in tacit collusion between firms in a market.Violent conflicts, Rent-seeking games, Herfindahl-Hirschman index, Oligopolistic competition.

Institutions and the resource curse

Countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners. We claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions. More natural resources push aggregate income down, when institutions are grabber friendly, while more resources raise income, when institutions are producer friendly. We test this theory building on Sachs and Warner's influential works on the resource curse. Our main hypothesis: that institutions are decisive for the resource curse, is confirmed. Our results are in sharp contrast to the claim by Sachs and Warner that institutions do not play a role.Natural resources, Institutional quality, Growth, Rent-seeking

Institutions and the Resource Curse

Countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners. We claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions. More natural resources push aggregate income down, when institutions are grabber friendly, while more resources raise income, when institutions are producer friendly. We test this theory building on Sachs and Warner's influential works on the resource curse. Our main hypothesis: that institutions are decisive for the resource curse, is confirmed. Our results are in sharp contrast to the claim by Sachs and Warner that institutions do not play a role.Natural resources, Institutional quality, Growth, Rent-seeking

Institutions and the resource curse

Countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners. We claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions. More natural resources push aggregate income down, when institutions are grabber friendly, while more resources raise income, when institutions are producer friendly. We test this theory building on Sachs and Warner's influential works on the resource curse. Our main hypothesis: that institutions are decisive for the resource curse, is confirmed. Our results are in sharp contrast to the claim by Sachs and Warner that institutions do not play a role.Natural resources, Institutional quality, Growth, Rent-seeking

Cursed by resources or institutions?

Natural resource abundant countries constitute both growth losers and growth winners, and the main difference between the success cases and the cases of failure lays in the quality of institutions. With grabber friendly institutions more natural resources push aggregate income down, while with producer friendly institutions more natural resources increase income. Such a theory finds strong support in data. A key question we also discuss is if resources in addition alter the quality of institutions. When that is the case, countries with bad institutions suffer a double resource curse - as the deterioration of institutions strenghtens the negative effect of more natural resources.Natural resources; Institutional quality; Growth; Rent-seeking

Opium for the Masses? Conflict-Induced Narcotics Production in Afghanistan

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western hostile casualties, our proxy for conflict, have strong impact on subsequent local opium production. This proxy is shown to be exogenous to opium. We exploit the discontinuity at the end of the planting season: Conflicts have strong effects before and no effect after planting, assuring causality. Effects are strongest where government law enforcement is weak.conflict, narcotics production, resource curse, Afghanistan

Employment as a Price or a Prize of Equality: A Descriptive Analysis

To put Scandinavian employment in perspective, we ask whether wage compression hampers employment rates, or not. We answer by reviewing the most important theoretical arguments and the most informative regularities across countries with different wage distributions. The pattern seems to be that countries with compressed wage distributions tend to have higher employment, and countries with higher wage inequality tend to have lower employment. This also holds when we consider the rate of labor force participation. In line with the theoretical arguments, coordination in wage bargaining seems to contribute to both employment expansion and wage compression. There is a clear positive correlation between coordination and employment even when we control for inequality, country, and year-specific effects

Governance and Development

In this paper we discuss whether or not `governance' is an important source of variation in development experiences. We draw four main conclusions. First, governance is best thought of a sub-set of `institutions' and as such emphasis on governance is consistent with much recent academic work. Nevertheless, governance is a quite vague rubric which it is difficult to unbundle. Second, the governance of a society is the outcome of a political process and as such is closely related to the literature on the political economy of development. Third, improving governance necessitates understanding the nature of the entire political equilibrium. Finally, an important research frontier is understanding the forces that create or impeded endogenous changes in governance.