We study the fiscal determinants of the French Revolution, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the salt tax - a large source of royal revenues and one of the most extractive forms of taxation of the Ancien Régime. Implementing a Regression Discontinuity design (RDD), we find that parts...

We study the fiscal determinants of the French Revolution, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the salt tax - a large source of royal revenues and one of the most extractive forms of taxation of the Ancien Régime. Implementing a Regression Discontinuity design (RDD), we find that parts...

The revolution of deregulation that swept national markets with particular force in the Americas was followed by the rise of complex and diverse regulatory institutions. Mexico was the poster child of governance by regulators as, in the 2000s and 2010s, its governing being used, in the energy...

Understanding the consequences and recovery for countries hit by adverse national events such as political crises is central to understanding long-run development dynamics. Utilizing the Coleman boat framework, we develop a micro-foundation based theoretical framework grounded in public choice...

The existential catastrophe faced by the population of the Gaza Strip currently looms large in the foreign policy and security debates. The plight of civilians there is par­ticularly acute. Yet, severe crises persist elsewhere too - from Ukraine and Sudan to Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of...

It is widely accepted that episodes of social unrest, conflict, political tensions and policy uncertainty affect the economy. Nevertheless, the real-time dimension of such relationships is less studied, and it remains unclear how to incorporate them in a forecasting framework. This can be partly...

This paper revisits the standard explanations of the violent Chilean protests of late 2019, and in particular their exclusive focus on the role of inequality, which in fact had been falling prior to the emergence of unrest. Instead, we suggest that blame may lie in a crisis of trust in...

This paper investigates the relationship between international sanctions and coups d'état in targeted countries. Employing a panel logit model and utilizing data from 1972 to 2013 drawn from the Global Sanctions Database and the Coup Leaders Dataset, we analyze the effects of UN and Western...

We assess how one of the largest public works programmes in the world-Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP)-affected violent conflict and civil unrest. Using difference-in-differences methods and linking administrative and geocoded conflict event data, we find that the PSNP did not...

We study the relationship between inequality and social instability. While the argument that inequality can be damaging for the cohesion of a society is well established, the empirical evidence is mixed. We use a novel approach to isolate the causal relationship running from inequality to social...

War has raged in Sudan since April 2023 following fundamental changes in the political balance of power in recent years. The previously dominant security sector is deeply divided and the once weakly organised civil society has mobilised. Competition within the security sector made it possible to...

This study shows that civilians' behavior can be severely affected by territorial control by an insurgent group, and that these effects can persist after the government regains control and the occupation ends. I consider a framework of civilian behavior under insurgent rule, where civilians have...

We study how negative sentiment around an industry impacts beliefs and behaviors, focusing on demands for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd and the salience of the “defund the police” movement. We assess stakeholder beliefs on the impact of protests on the stock prices of...

Do salient episodes of state violence affect citizens' willingness to pay taxes for different social purposes in the long run? In this article, I answer this question using an original dataset that geolocates individuals who were seriously injured during the anti-communist Romanian revolution of...

This paper shows that franchise extension is not enough for commitment to redistribution and that in the absence of de facto empowerment, the threat of revolution is intact. In particular, the paper studies the relationship between a democratic reform that extends the political rights of a...

We study the long-term effects of the Cultural Revolution, characterised by widespread violence, summary executions and chaos, on a set of trust outcomes among people surveyed by the China Survey in 2008. We find that the revolution, identified by cohort-specific exposure to excess deaths at the...

Did the outbreak of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars influence technical change during the Industrial Revolution? We address this question by investigating an instance of state intervention into the market for inventions from 1793-1820: the introduction of a new proviso into British...

How do political crises affect the interaction between economic and political outcomes? In this paper, we study one of the consequences of political turmoil by empirically examining whether the Arab Spring influenced the relationship between corruption and income inequality. Using panel data...

We compare political mobilization and support for democratic values during the French Revolution among the home bailliages and among individual members of French regiments sent with the Comte de Rochambeau to fight alongside American revolutionaries (1781-83), to others also assigned there who...

The number of individuals forcibly displaced by conflicts has been rising in the past few decades. However, we know little about the dynamics - magnitude, timing, and persistence - of conflict-induced migration in the short run. We use novel high-frequency data to estimate the dynamic migration...