Innovation for despots? How dictators and democratic leaders differ in stifling innovation and misusing natural resources across 114 countries

Conventional wisdom holds that natural resource abundance negatively affects economic development, especially in countries with weak quality of governance. In this paper we raise a related, yet separate, question that was largely overlooked in the literature - the effect of natural resource rents on technological innovations, a very specific type of economic activity. We argue that the abundance of natural resources negatively affects...