Pushing One’s Luck: Petroleum ownership and discoveries

Christa Brunnschweiler and Steven Poelhekke

No 219, OxCarre Working Papers from Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: Does institutional change in the petroleum sector lead to more oil and gas ex-ploration and discoveries? Foreign ownership and investment in the sector has tra-ditionally been unrestricted. We document that this is no longer the case; foreign-domestic partnerships are the norm today. Tracking changes in legislation between 1867 and 2008 for a panel of countries, we show that switching to foreign ownership results in more drilling and more discoveries of petroleum than domestic ownership. Switching to partnership yields even more drilling, but yields fewer discoveries. Dis¬coveries, and the intensity and quality of exploration drilling, are endogenous to industry-specific institutional change.

Keywords: discoveries; oil and gas; natural resources; institutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E02 O43 Q30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-mac
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0ba4697a-4df0-4944-8414-850475dc2f52 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:oxcrwp:219

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OxCarre Working Papers from Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies, University of Oxford Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melis Boya ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).