the missing dimension of the political resource curse debate given the methodological sophistication of the debate over the political resource curse the purported negative relationship between natural resource wealth in particular oil wealth and democracy it is surprising that scholars have not paid more attention to the basic statistical issue of how to deal with missing data this article highlights the problems caused by the most common strategy for analyzing missing data in the political resource curse literature listwise deletion and investigates how addressing such problems through the best practice technique of multiple imputation affects empirical results i find that multiple imputation causes the results of a number of influential recent studies to converge on a key common finding a political resource curse does exist but only since the widespread nationalization of petroleum industries in the 1970s this striking finding suggests that much of the controversy over the political resource curse has been caused by a neglect of missing data issues

lessons from strange cases democracy development and the resource curse in the u s states the work linking natural resource wealth to authoritarianism and under development suffers from several shortcomings in this article the authors outline those shortcomings and address them in a new empirical setting using a new data set for the u s states spanning 73 years and case studies of texas and louisiana the authors are able to more carefully examine both the diachronic nature and comparative legs of the resource curse hypothesis than previous research has they provide evidence that natural resource dependence contributes to slower economic growth poorer developmental performance and less competitive politics using this empirical setting they also begin parsing the mechanisms that might explain the negative association between resource wealth and political and economic development they draw implications from intranational findings for resource abundant countries across the world and suggest directions for future cross national and cross state work

negativity in an almost ideal import demand system estimates of demand systems consistent with the underlying theory of a utility maximizing consumer are necessary if accurate welfare predictions are to be made in this paper we concentrate upon the negativity constraint and assess its validity using the almost ideal demand system subject to adding up homogeneity and symmetry applied to detailed trade and production data in the context of an import allocation model given the overwhelming rejection of negativity we consider a number of increasingly restrictive conditions which can be applied to the price parameters to try and achieve negativity over the sample data in general it is found that very tight constraints on substitution effects have to be imposed which remove the flexible nature of the model

emotional bidders an analytical and experimental examination of consumers behavior in a priceline like reverse auction e commerce has proved to be fertile ground for new business models which may be patented for up to 20 years and have potentially far reaching impact on the e commerce landscape one such electronic market is the reverse auction model popularized by priceline com there is still uncertainty surrounding the survival of such new electronic markets currently available on the internet understanding user behavior is necessary for better assessment of these sites survival this paper adds to economic analysis a formal representation of the emotions evoked by the auction process specifically the excitement of winning if a bid is accepted and the frustration of losing if it is not we generate and empirically test a number of insights related to 1 the impact of expected excitement at winning and frustration at losing on bids across consumers and biddings scenarios and 2 the dynamic nature of the bidding behavior that is how winning and losing in previous bids influence their future bidding behavior

framing the deal the role of restrictions in accentuating deal value we propose that consumers use the presence of a restriction i e purchase limit purchase precondition or time limit as a source of information to evaluate a deal in a series of four studies we present evidence suggesting that restrictions serve to accentuate deal value and act as promoters of promotions we begin by using aggregate level scanner data to test our hypothesis that a sales restriction e g limit x per customer results in higher sales via three subsequent experiments we then investigate contextual and individual factors moderating this effect study 2 suggests that restrictions only have a positive effect for low need for cognition individuals study 3 explores the potential mediating role of deal evaluations on purchase intent across discount levels study 4 examines the effect of three types of restrictions purchase limits time limits and purchase preconditions across discount levels and explores the underlying beliefs driving these effects an integrative model across studies demonstrates the robustness of the restriction effect and supports the premise that restrictions work through signaling value implications for how consumers determine promotional value are discussed

oil wealth and regime survival in the developing world 1960 1999 the global oil market and its associated booms and busts have generated a large literature in political science one contention in this literature is that political instability is a near certain long term outcome of oil wealth another line of argument maintains just the opposite that oil makes authoritarian regimes stronger by funding patronage and repressive apparatuses in this article i conduct the first cross national tests of these arguments and investigate the effects of oil wealth and the oil booms and busts on political stability drawing on data from 107 developing countries between 1960 and 1999 i estimate the effects of oil wealth on regime failure antistate social protest and domestic armed conflict thus as a first goal this article addresses an analytic shortcoming in previous studies by separating regime survival empirically from both economic policy and regime type democratic or authoritarian and by focusing on the direct effects of oil wealth on several measures of political stability i address the relationship between oil wealth and these outcomes both by comparing exporters to the rest of the developing world and by comparing oil rich states across pre boom boom and bust periods the results indicate that oil wealth is robustly associated with more durable regimes and significantly related to lower levels of protest and civil war moreover

learning to love the dutch disease evidence from the mineral economies abstract recent literature proposes that a booming minerals sector may not only lead to dutch disease effects it may also be a development curse mineral economy case studies have tentatively confirmed this recourse curse thesis this paper examines the long run economic and development performance of a more general grouping of mineral based economies and finds little corroborating evidence

financial deprivation prompts consumers to seek scarce goods consumers assess their well being subjectively largely by comparing the present state of their lives to the state of comparable others and to their own state earlier in time the authors suggest that consumers similarly assess their financial wellbeing and when these evaluations highlight a deficit in their financial position they pursue strategies that mitigate the associated sense of financial deprivation specifically consumers counteract the relative deficit in their financial resources by acquiring goods that are consequently unavailable to other consumers in their environment the results from five studies suggest that the inferiority and unpleasant affect associated with financial deprivation motivates consumers to attend to choose and consume scarce goods rather than comparable abundant goods these effects diminish when scarce goods are limited because other people have already obtained them and when consumers attribute their unpleasant feelings to a source unrelated to financial deprivation

do natural resources fuel authoritarianism a reappraisal of the resource curse a large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy extant cross country regressions however assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships numerous sources of bias may be driving the results the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country specific and time invariant heterogeneity to address these problems we develop unique historical datasets employ time series centric techniques and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals we test to see if there is a long run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time both on a country by country basis and across several different panels we find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism in fact in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing

revisiting the resource curse natural disasters the price of oil and democracy fluctuations in the price of oil and the contemporaneous political changes in oil producing countries have raised an important question about the link between oil rents political institutions and civil liberties this article presents a sim ple model of the relationship between resource income and political freedom and using an instrumental variables approach estimates the causal effect of shocks to oil revenues on levels of democracy using a new data set multiple measures of democ racy and various specifications ifi nd that the effect of oil price shocks is larger than might be expected and on the order of the effects found from changes in gross domes tic product an umber of studies show that ar esource curse exists that is they demonstrate that relatively large natural resource endowments exert negative effects on politi cal institutions both case studies and analyses based on data drawn from large numbers of countries across long periods of time show that individuals are less able to hold their leaders accountable if they live in countries blessed by abundant natural resources than if they reside in less well endowed nations in contrast to conventional wisdom then at least some types of wealth undermine rather than accelerate the development of democratic political institutions the existing literature however suffers from two problems that cast doubt on their conclusions about the resource curse first contributors to it cannot disen tangle two very different mechanisms 1 changes in resource income produce changes in political institutions and 2 shifts in governments policies explain variations in resource revenues for example oil prices rise when political leaders either consolidate their power russia and venezuela or pursue more radical pol icies iran it is also true however that rising prices can enable leaders to aban don moderate policies postponing for example the pursuit of market oriented

regional convergence evidence from a new state by state capital stock series this paper seeks to reconcile the growth empirics technique of mankiw romer and weil 1992 with the empirical results of barro and sala i martin 1991 through the development of a new database covering the 1977 96 period we create state by state capital stock and gross investment estimates by apportioning the national capital stock among the states using these estimates along with gross state product and employment data we find evidence that the solow growth model explains state wide growth during this period we consistently find a rate of convergence of around 2 our results as a consequence suggest that the empirical results of barro and sala i martin are driven by the neoclassical growth process of solow

history lessons institutions factor endowments and paths of development in the new world the explanations offered for the contrasting records of long run growth and development among the societies of north and south america most often focus on institutions the traditional explanations for the sources of these differences in institutions typically highlight the significance of national heritage or religion we in contrast argue that a hemispheric perspective across the wide range of colonies established in the new world by the europeans suggests that although there were many influences factor endowments or initial conditions had profound and enduring effects on the long run paths of institutional and economic development followed by the respective economies

is democracy good for the poor many scholars claim that democracy improves the welfare of the poor this article uses data on infant and child mortality to challenge this claim cross national studies tend to exclude from their samples nondemocratic states that have performed well this leads to the mistaken inference that nondemocracies have worse records than democracies once these and other flaws are corrected democracy has little or no effect on infant and child mortality rates democracies spend more money on education and health than nondemocracies but these benefits seem to accrue to middle and upper income groups

the dark side of scarcity promotions how exposure to limited quantity promotions can induce aggression marketers frequently use scarcity promotions where a product or event is limited in availability the present research shows conditions under which the mere exposure to such advertising can activate actual aggression that manifests even outside the domain of the good being promoted further we document the process underlying this effect exposure to limited quantity promotion advertising prompts consumers to perceive other shoppers as competitive threats to obtaining a desired product and physiologically prepares consumers to aggress seven studies using multiple behavioral measures of aggression demonstrate this deleterious response to scarcity promotions

does natural resource abundance increase latin american income inequality abstract why is income inequality higher in latin america than in east asia is this phenomenon related to the region s natural resource abundance is it a contributor to latin america s slow and narrowly focused human capital accumulation if so can anything be done to reverse the latin american trends or should we think of the region s fate as unalterable to help answer these questions this paper draws upon standard trade theory and cross sectional empirical analysis to demonstrate that natural resource intensive sectors particularly permanent agriculture absorb capital that might otherwise flow to manufacturing this depresses workers incentive to accumulate skill and delays industrialization

scarcity polarizes preferences the impact on choice among multiple items in a product class this research examines how the salience of scarcity influences choices of individual items from a product class the authors propose that overall perception of scarcity versus overall perception of abundance increases choice share of the most preferred item from a product class they argue that this phenomenon occurs because scarcity induces arousal and the heightened arousal polarizes the evaluations of individual items contained in the choice set the results from five experiments show that scarcity versus abundance broadens the discrepancy between the liking of the favorite and nonfavorite items and leads to a greater choice share of the favorite item the findings provide support for the arousal based explanation showing that the effect of scarcity salience on choices is mediated by consumers reported arousal level and moderated by an experimentally induced arousal state

when do price promotions affect pretrial brand evaluations the authors investigate the conditions in which price promotions affect pretrial brand evaluations a price promotion is theorized to be informative about brand quality when it stands out because i

limited availability reduces the rate of satiation in general consumers enjoy products less with repeated consumption unfortunately there are few known ways to slow such satiation the authors show that consumers satiate more slowly on a product when it is available for consumption only at limited times specifically they find that perceived limited availability made a product more enjoyable and yet this effect largely emerged only after repeated consumption the authors attribute this finding to an urge to take advantage of a rare consumption opportunity which leads people to pay less attention to the quantity consumed and subsequently to experience less satiation a series of studies establish the effect of perceived limited availability on the rate of satiation show that it influences how much people eat provide mediation evidence of the proposed theoretical account and eliminate the effect by making salient the total amount consumed the authors conclude with implications of these findings

the origins of american industrial success 1879 1940 the united states became the world s preeminent manufacturing nation at the turn of the twentieth century this study considers the bases for this success by examining the factor content of trade in manufactured goods surprisingly the most distinctive characteristic of u s manufacturing exports was intensity in nonreproducible natural resources furthermnore this relative intensity was increasing between 1880 and 1920 the study then asks whether resource abundance reflected geological endowment or greater exploitation of geological potential it was mainly the latter jel 042 recent thinking about american economic performance has been marked by alarm over the country s loss of its competitive edge most of this discussion is not rooted in an understanding of the historical origins of the economic leadership now thought to be in jeopardy modern economists tend to assume that the american advantage has been technological and

a consumer perspective on price matching refund policies effect on price perceptions and search behavior although price matching refund policies are common in many retail environments the impact of such policies on consumers has largely been ignored this article reports the results of three studies that examine price matching policies from a consumer perspective study 1 shows that consumers perceive price matching policies as signals of low store prices and that the presence of a refund increases the likelihood of discontinuing price search contrary to the predictions based on signaling theory in information economics studies 2 and 3 show that when search costs are low the number of stores searched increases in the presence versus absence of a price matching policy when search costs are high consumers appear to accept the price matching signal at face value and search less in the presence of a refund the article concludes by discussing the theoretical implications of the findings and suggesting directions for future research

cross country evidence on the link between volatility and growth this paper presents empirical evidence against the standard dichotomy in macroeconomics that separates growth from the volatility of economic fluctuations in a sample of ninety two countries as well as a sample of oecd countries the authors find that countries with higher volatility have lower growth the addition of standard control variables strengthens the negative relationship the authors also find that government spending induced volatility is negatively associated with growth even after controlling for both time and country fixed effects copyright 1995 by american economic association

explaining the dynamics of the southeast asian political economy state society and the search for economic growth this essay reviews two sets of books that explore the origins and dynamics of southeast asia s growth and economic transformation one set of books utilizes a structuralist framework and emphasizes the role of the state in creating a now powerful capitalist class the other set of books utilizes an institutionalist framework to explain how new patterns of private public sector collaboration have resulted in rapid economic growth the authors point to weaknesses in both approaches and to areas where the two approaches can be fruitfully synthesized they also offer suggestions for future research