I don't know if anyone has released any papers on the idea yet, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thought of it, and I've been putting the idea out there for at least 15 years now, so I'm certain that at least one other person has given it some thought at this point.

The sort of resources this would be most useful for are the sort of things that are considered 'rare' or expensive to mine here on earth. Rare earth elements, gold, and even methane are all fairly abundant in space. Manufacturing could be moved to the moon, and we could likely build human expansion from there for another few millenia before we started facing the problems with waste and pollution that we see here on earth.