The Internet and mobile phones have rapidly spread around the world in the last decade. Today many citizens, including those in the poorest countries, have access to cell phones. What is the impact of this new technology on political protest? In this paper, we take a first step at investigating...

Across the social sciences, lagged explanatory variables are a common strategy to confront challenges to causal identification using observational data. We show that "lag identification"--the use of lagged explanatory variables to solve endogeneity problems--is an illusion: lagging independent...

Across the social sciences, lagged explanatory variables are a common strategy to confront challenges to causal identification using observational data. We show that "lag identification"--the use of lagged explanatory variables to solve endogeneity problems--is an illusion: lagging independent...

This paper examines how political business relations have shaped country vulnerability to financial crises during periods of international financial contagion. While close relations between political and business elites in island Southeast Asia deepened vulnerability during the Asian Financial...

Across the Muslim world, Islamic political parties and social organizations have capitalized upon economic grievances to gain political support. But existing research has been unable to disentangle the role of Islamic party ideology from programmatic economic appeals and social services in...

Indonesia’s 1999 decentralization law gave local governments in Indonesia an unprecedented opportunity to adopt pro-development policies. We estimate the effect of decentralization (enacted in 2001) on national economic performance using a synthetic case control methodology. Our results...

In the eyes of many citizens, activists, pundits, and scholars, American democracy appears under threat. Concern about President Trump and the future of American politics may be found among both conservatives and progressives; among voters, activists, and elites; and among many scholars and...

Across the social sciences, lagged explanatory variables are a common strategy to confront challenges to causal identification using observational data. We show that “lag identification” — the use of lagged explanatory variables to solve endogeneity problems — is an illusion: lagging...

This paper introduces a new approach to discovering and exploring society-wide social beliefs about ethnic structure. Rooted in computational text analysis, it combines the strengths of both qualitative and survey-based approaches to the study of ethnicity. I use a structural topic modeling...