TY  - JOUR
AU  - Tella,Rafael Di
AU  - Dubra,Juan
AU  - MacCulloch,Robert
TI  - A Resource Belief-Curse? Oil and Individualism
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14556
PY  - 2008
Y2  - December 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14556
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14556.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Rafael Di Tella
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field Rd
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617/495-6000
E-Mail: rditella@hbs.edu

Juan Dubra
Universidad de Montevideo
Montevideo, Uruguay
E-Mail: dubraj@um.edu.uy

Robert MacCulloch
The Business School
Imperial College London
South Kensington Campus
London SW7 2AZ
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)20 7594157
Fax: +44 (0)20 7823 7685
E-Mail: r.macculloch@imperial.ac.uk
AB  - We study the correlation between a belief concerning individualism and a measure of luck in the US during the period 1983-2004. The measure of beliefs is the answer to a question related to whether the poor should be helped by the government or if they should help themselves, while the measure of luck is the share of the oil industry in the state's economy multiplied by the price of oil. The correlation is negative, suggesting that more reliance on luck is correlated with less individualism. We provide three short models that help interpret this correlation. One implication of this finding is that societies that depend heavily on oil, and perhaps natural resources more generally, will experience a heavier demand for government intervention. We argue that if a government cares about the impact of its natural resource policies on the demand of government intervention more generally, it should take this effect into account.
ER  -