This paper estimates the effect of the recent shale oil and shale gas boom in the United States on economic outcomes at the county level. In particular I provide a tentative answer why there may be no Dutch Disease in the manufacturing sector, despite rising labour costs. I show that resource extraction is a source …
Can public employment schemes significantly affect the nature of the violence process? Can the state, by providing employment in times of need “win the hearts and minds” of its citizens and thus, expand its monopoly of power? This paper answers these two questions by studying the impact of the world’s largest public employment scheme on …
The idea that blackouts might lead to baby booms has been a subject of contention for a long time. It first came to prominence in popular culture after the great New York blackout of 1965, which left over 30 million people without electricity for 13 hours. But a study of the event’s consequences concluded that …
Max Weber defined a functioning state as “a human community that (successfully) claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”. This does not apply to Somalia. In Somalia, the effective monopoly of power has not been with any form of state since 1991. It has been topping the …