We measure the effect of coal resource sector dependence on long run income growth using the natural experiment of coal mining in 409 U.S. counties that are selected for homogeneity. Using a panel data set (1970-2010), we find a one standard deviation increase in resource dependence is associated with an estimated 0.6 percentage point drop in annual growth rates of per capita personal income. W...

The correlation between natural resource abundance, authoritarianism and poor developmental outcomes—typically referred to as the resource curse—is one of the few findings in comparative politics and political economy on which there is something approaching a scholarly consensus. That the case, there is widespread disagreement as to the causal mechanisms underpinning the correlation. Indeed, we...

In existing studies, no consensus has been reached on the relationship between natural resource dependence and human capital accumulation. To narrow the divergence, this paper carries out a normative research to explain the co-existence of the phenomena of the resource curse and the resource blessing based on an organic combination of conceptual and mathematical models. It first establishes a c...