We estimate the causal effect of access to clean water sources on educational outcomes in Indonesia. Using the longitudinal Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) panel dataset, which follows the same individuals from 1993 to 2014, and applying household fixed effects allows us to identify the...

In this paper, we unveil targeted repression against journalists as an elaborate strategy used by modern autocrats to mitigate the risk of mass protests during autocratic elections-a common threat to their rule. Repression is deployed to discipline the media before elections to secure favorable...

This study uncovers a powerful, yet overlooked geographic dimension to terrorism’s macroeconomic impact. Our findings reveal that terror's harm to FDI is profoundly shaped by attack location. Using Pakistan as a case study we show that assaults on economic and political centers cause far...

We investigate the effect of elections on underreporting COVID-19 mortality, measured as the difference between excess mortality and official statistics. Our identification strategy takes advantage of a natural experiment of the unanticipated onset of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and the...

We study the effect of terrorist attacks on the migration discourse in the European Parliament (EP). First, using an LLM model, we develop an original dataset on sentiments of all parliamentary speeches concerning migration for 2009-2019, building on a novel dataset by Sylvester et al. (2023)....

We revisit the effect of gun laws on suicide rates in the US states in the past 30 years by departing from the correlational analysis inherent in the previous literature and, instead, leveraging an instrumental variable (IV) approach based on policy convergences between contiguous states. The...

This study examines the impact of religiosity on preventive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, specifically on mask usage, vaccine administration, booster doses, and the probability of testing positive for COVID-19. This study employs an extensive, recurrent dataset from...

Can historical institutions affect today's firm innovation? We analyze a historical experiment in 1902, when the foreign-run Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMC), known for its efficient and transparent governance, took over some of the notoriously corrupt Chinese Native Custom stations and...

Can colonialism affect today's urban outcomes? This paper examines the long-run impact of Concessions - foreign-run enclaves established in the late nineteenth century inside Chinese cities by European settlers for residence and investment purposes. They soon became the new economic hubs of...

We are the first to analyze the effect of terror on stock markets by terror ideology. Surprisingly, we find that Islamist terror attacks created significant negative abnormal returns in American and European markets, but the stock market effects of other terror attacks were almost nil. For our...