Vaccines are responsible for large increases in human welfare and yet we know little about the political impacts of publicly-managed vaccination campaigns. We fill this gap by studying the case of Chile, which offers a rare combination of a high-stakes election, voluntary voting, and a...

We study the role of proximity to historical ethnic borders in determining individual land ownership in Sub-Saharan Africa. Following an instrumental variable strategy, we document that individuals have a lower likelihood of owning land near historical ethnic borders. In particular, the...

We study the role of proximity to historical ethnic borders in determining individual land ownership in Sub-Saharan Africa. Following an instrumental variable strategy, we document that individuals have a lower likelihood of owning land near historical ethnic borders. In particular, the...

We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity's...

We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity's...

This research explores the historical roots of the division of labor in pre-modern societies. It advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that intra-ethnic diversity had a positive effect on the division of labor across ethnicities in the pre-modern era. Exploiting a variety of...

In their comment, Delpeyrou and Bertoli (2024) make several critiques of our paper (Depetris-Chauvin et al., 2020). In this reply, we show that: (i) Their purported "errors" in data construction are in the vast majority of cases simply the result of different (and, we argue, superior) choices in...

Governments in hegemonic states use economic sanctions to induce changes in other countries. What happens to international business networks when these sanctions are in place? We use new historical firm-level data to document the destruction of financial relations between U.S. banks and Chilean...

We estimate the transmission of higher education across generations using the arrival of the Pinochet dictatorship to Chile in 1973 as natural experiment. Pinochet promoted a large contraction in the number of seats available for new students across all universities. Using census data, we find...

We study the effects of competition by state-owned firms, leveraging the decentralized entry of public pharmacies to local markets in Chile. Public pharmacies sell the same drugs at a third of private pharmacy prices, because of stronger upstream bargaining and market power in the private...