Criminal groups use violence strategically to manipulate the behavior of victims and bystanders. At the same time, violence is a stimulus that causes fear, which also shapes people’s reactions. Taking advantage of the randomness in the timing of antipersonnel landmine accidents in Colombia, as...

We study how antipersonnel landmines thwart democratic accountability and the consolidation of post-conflict democratic institutions. We do so by exploiting the randomness in the timing of landmine explosions relative to election days, comparing the electoral outcomes of voting polls located...

This paper studies the effect of expanding internet access on electoral outcomes at the municipality level in Colombia. I use a difference-in-differences strategy that compares electoral outcomes in municipalities that received the internet right before the presidential election, with those that...

Can televised political advertising change voting behavior in elections held in authoritarian regimes? We study the case of Chile, where the opposition used television campaigns weeks before the election that ended the seventeen-year dictatorship known as the Pinochet regime. Using national...

This paper studies the effect of strengthening democracy, as captured by an increase in voting rights, on the incidence of violent civil conflict in nineteenth-century Colombia. Empirically studying the relationship between democracy and conflict is challenging, not only because of conceptual...