Economic development and known natural resource endowment: Discovery rate differentials of oil

Abstract

The location of oil reserves plays an essential role in policymakers’ incentives to coordinate supply-side climate policy. In this paper I use data on the location of all historic onshore petroleum discoveries to establish a new stylized fact: Economically developed areas are many times more likely to contain an oil or gas discovery, compared to undeveloped areas. I show that this result is not driven reverse causality or confounding geology. By implication, there exist large additional undiscovered oil and gas deposits in currently undeveloped areas, mainly located outside of Europe and North America. I quantify these deposits to be about 40% of total discovered onshore oil reserves.