He received his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University in 1996. His research deals with political economy, democratization, natural resources, and poverty in the developing world - particularly (but not exclusively) in Southeast Asia. His main project is a book on the "resource curse" that explains why countries with lots of natural resource wealth tend to do worse than countries without resource wealth. His most recent publication is Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdown in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2001).Oil, Islam, and Gender