We combine original geo-referenced data on mining extraction of 15 minerals with information on conflict events at spatial resolution of 0.5o x 0.5o for all Africa over 1997-2010. Exploiting exogenous variations in world prices, we find a positive impact of mining on conict at the local level....

Bai et al. (2023) examine the impact of individual networks on state building, focusing on the role of the leader Zeng Guofan during the Taiping Revolution in China between 1850 and 1864. In their main results, the authors demonstrate that being connected to Zeng increases the number of...

This paper uses detailed information on the latitude and longitude of conflict events within a set of Sub-Saharan African countries to study the impact of external income shocks on the likelihood of violence. We consider a number of external demand shocks faced by the country or the regions...

In this paper, we show that drought has a positive effect on the incidence of civil war over the 1945-2005 period in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use the Palmer Drought Severity Index which is a richer measurement of drought than the measures used in the literature (rainfall and temperature) as it...

We show that inequality triggers social unrest in rural India. We develop a theoretical framework where social unrest is rationally used by civilians to oppose (unfair) surplus sharing by the elite. We predict that the probability of observing social unrest in a village increases with the sum of...

We study market rents in the neighborhood of asylum seeker hosting centers. Our empirical setting exploits the quasi-random opening of centers and spatial allocation of asylum seekers in Switzerland. Rents within 0.7km of an active center are found on average to be 3.8% lower than rents in the...

We construct a dynamic theory of civil conflict hinging on inter-ethnic trust and trade. The model economy is inhabitated by two ethnic groups. Inter-ethnic trade requires imperfectly observed bilateral investments and one group has to form beliefs on the average propensity to trade of the other...

We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Uganda during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-04. We exploit two waves of...

We study from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective how a network of military alliances and enmities affects the intensity of a conflict. The model combines elements from network theory and from the politico-economic theory of conflict. We obtain a closed-form characterization of the...

Analyses of spatial or network data are now very common. Nevertheless, statistical inference is challenging since unobserved heterogeneity can be correlated across neighboring observational units. We develop an estimator for the variance-covariance matrix (VCV) of OLS and 2SLS that allows for...