I compare the impact of local tax revenue and royalties from the extraction of natural resources on governance in Colombian municipalities, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation from cadastral updates and fluctuations in the world price of oil. Higher tax revenue has a larger effect on local public goods in the areas of education, health, and water than a same-sized increase in oil royalties, despite earmarking of royalties for spending in these areas. Higher tax revenue also reduces the probability of a disciplinary prosecution against the municipal mayor, but the opposite is true for royalties, particularly for misbehavior related to public spending.

I study the overstatement of economic growth in autocracies by comparing self-reported GDP figures to night-time light recorded by satellites from outer space. I show that the night-time-light elasticity of GDP is larger in authoritarian regimes, even accounting for differences in multiple country characteristics. This autocracy gradient in the elasticity is greater when the incentive to exaggerate economic growth is stronger or when the constraints on exaggeration are weaker. The results suggest that autocracies overstate yearly GDP growth by approximately 35%. Adjusting the data for manipulation leads to a more nuanced view on the recent economic success of autocracies.