Oil and Conflict: What Does the Cross Country Evidence Really Show?
利用石油发现的历史面板数据，研究发现控制国家固定效应后石油财富与内战爆发无统计关联，石油发现反而增加了非民主国家的军费开支。
This paper re-examines the effect of oil wealth on political violence. Using a unique historical panel dataset of oil discoveries, we show that simply controlling for country fixed effects removes the statistical association between the value of oil reserves and civil war onset. Other macro-political violence measures, such as coup attempts, are also uncorrelated with oil wealth. To further address endogeneity concerns, we exploit changes in oil reserves due to randomness in the success of oil explorations. We find little robust evidence that oil discoveries increase the likelihood of political violence. Rather, oil discoveries increase military spending in nondemocratic countries.