While economic deprivation is an important determinant of civil conflict, it cannot completely explain the incentives for warfare. In irregular wars, for example, both incumbents and insurgents may employ various tactics to win the hearts and minds of civilians in order to muster territorial...

While economic deprivation is an important determinant of civil conflict, it cannot completely explain the incentives for warfare. In irregular wars, for example, both incumbents and insurgents may employ various tactics to win the hearts and minds of civilians in order to muster territorial...

This paper uses a unique longitudinal data set to examine the costly behavioral changes adopted by agricultural households in response to the 1996 — 2006 Maoist insurgency in Nepal. After the war onset, agricultural households that were exposed to high conflict intensity expand their crop...

In this paper, I study whether a strong centralized state facilitated the development of local institutions in Imperial China from 1000 A.D. to 1900 A.D. I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the state administrative capacity in the local area induced by regime changes. Using a novel and...

We examine the effect of inter-ethnic income inequality on conflict intensification in Mandate Palestine, using a novel panel dataset comprising district-level characteristics and conflict intensity across 18 districts during 1926-1945. We instrument Jewish-Arab income inequality by combining...

This paper uses a historical natural experiment – the opening of the Suez Canal – to investigate the relationship between geography and the formation of institutions. While the conventional view is that good geography (commodity endowment) inevitably favours the creation of extractive...

Social networks may be important to internal migrants in developing countries where the extent of information asymmetry is sizeable. This paper identifies network effects among rural-urban migrants in Thailand by exploiting heterogeneous response to rainfall shocks as exogenous variation...

The partitioning of political jurisdictions is becoming an increasingly common component of agreements to end ethnic conflict, although its impact on post-conflict recovery remains unclear. This paper studies the effects of the partition which ended the 1992-1995 Bosnian War on the post-war...

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader - President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan - in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in...