Christa N. Brunnschweiler

The Natural Resource Curse

Christa N. Brunnschweiler’s research interests are in applied economics, mainly having explored topics in economic growth and development, particularly in resource economics and conflict studies, but also in political economy. She has published several well-cited articles on the natural resource curse. Recently she has been studying how attitudes and behaviour for better natural resource management can be changed using behavioural economics, with fieldwork completed in Ghana and Indonesia. In her research, Ms. Brunnschweiler uses secondary data, as well as primary data gathered through surveys, field experiments, lab and lab-in-the-field experiments, and survey experiments.

While visiting the CESifo, Ms. Brunnschweiler looks forward to working on two papers based on data from fieldwork in Indonesia in early summer 2022. She and her collaborators seek to understand the public’s knowledge and attitudes towards petroleum exploitation and the use of petroleum revenues in the extraction areas, and they employ a video experiment to explore how demand for accountability on resource revenue use can be increased. She will also present work in progress on the effects of the quality of electrification on education outcomes in India and looks forward to fruitful exchanges with colleagues in Munich during her stay.

Christa N. Brunnschweiler is an Associate Professor in Economics at the School of Economics of the University of East Anglia (UEA). Previously, she was a Research Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. Before that, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Center of Economic Research at ETH Zurich, after getting her PhD in Economics from the University of Zurich. Ms. Brunnschweiler is a member of the Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) and the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) at UEA, a researcher with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a member of the Committee for Environmental and Resource Economics of the German Economic Association (Verein für Socialpolitik), and an External Research Associate at OxCarre, University of Oxford.