We aim at understanding the triggers of electoral violence, which spoiled 80% of elections in Africa during the last decades.  We focus on Burundi, a country which experienced polls in 2010, only a few months after the end of a long-lasting civil war.  Our results suggest that higher...

We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization.  During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to...

Demand for oil is very price inelastic.  Facing such demand, an extractive cartell induces the highest price that does not destroy its demand, unlike the conventional Hotelling analysis: the cartel tolerates ordinary substitutes to its oil but deters high-potential ones.  Limit-pricing...

Climate policy requires that much of the world's reserves of fossil fuels remain unburned.  This paper makes the case for implementing this directly through policy to close the global coal industry.  Coal is singled out because of its high emissions intensity, low rents per unit value, local...

I use a randomised conditional cash transfer program from Indonesia to provide evidence on peer effects in consumption of poor households.  I combine this with consumption visibility data from Indonesia to examine whether peer effects in consumption differ by a good's visibility.  In line with...

We analyse intertemporal poverty in two important dimensions - income and nutrition - in less developed northwest China during 2000-2004.  A generalised recursive selection model is proposed which enables simultaneous estimation of the causes of intertemporal poverty within and between...

We exploit a unique opportunity to study how a large population of players in the field learn to play a novel game with a complicated and non-intuitive mixed strategy equilibrium.  We argue that standard models of belief-based learning and reinforcement learning are unable to explain the data,...

Big Data offer potential benefits for statistical modelling, but confront problems like an excess of false positives, mistaking correlations for causes, ignoring sampling biases, and selecting by inappropriate methods.  We consider the many important requirements when searching for a data-based...

A recent surge of literature on tax salience has included studies that use tax type as a proxy for salience.  The relationship between tax type and salience is not always apparent, however, nor is salience the only feature by which taxes differ.  In fact, taxes' behaviour over time suggests an...

Climate physics predicts that the intensity of natural disasters will increase in the future due to climate change.  One of the biggest challenges for economic modeling is the inherent uncertainty of climate events, which crucially affects consumption, investment, and abatement decisions.  We...