Five years after the bloody military coup and amid a civil war, elections have taken place in Myanmar. They were neither free nor fair, nor was any attempt made to keep up an appearance of even minimum democratic standards. From the outset, the main purpose of the elections was not political...

Can the exposure to civil war make people more motivated to pay taxes and (re)build the state? Our project examines this question in the context of Africa, a region where civil wars have frequently undermined state capacity. We move from the popular Tillian view of war-making as state-making to...

This handbook chapter provides a synthesis of the literature on armed conflicts, with a special focus on development economics, while covering also other disciplines. The piece starts off with a discussion of the main consequences of conflict before investigating its root causes. First, a series...

How can states rebuild fiscal capacity after a civil war? Trust in political institutions and trust in fellow citizens are cornerstones of tax compliance, necessary for a functioning fiscal contract. We posit that transitional justice (TJ) can influence both channels. We use a simple game of tax...

This study investigates the case of Iran to evaluate how changes in the intensity of international sanctions affect internal conflict in the target country. Estimating a vector autoregressive model for the period between 2001q2 and 2020q3 with quarterly data on internal conflict and its three...

The Middle East has experienced significant and wide-ranging consequences due to terrorism and the resulting War on Terror. The region saw substantial impacts as a result of the War on Terror. This study briefly overviews the security, economic and political repercussions of the prolonged...

Blair et al. (2023) examine the effect of UN peacekeeping on democratization in conflict-affected countries. They use fixed effects and instrumental variable estimators and find evidence that "UN missions with democracy promotion mandates are strongly positively correlated with the quality of...

This study investigates the case of Iran to evaluate how changes in the intensity of international sanctions affect internal conflict in the target country. Estimating a vector autoregressive model for the period between 2001q2 and 2020q3 with quarterly data on internal conflict and its three...

This study investigates the case of Iran to evaluate how changes in the intensity of international sanctions affect internal conflict in the target country. Estimating a vector autoregressive model for the period between 2001q2 and 2020q3 with quarterly data on internal conflict and its three...

Five years after the bloody military coup and amid a civil war, elections have taken place in Myanmar. They were neither free nor fair, nor was any attempt made to keep up an appearance of even minimum democratic standards. From the outset, the main purpose of the elections was not political...

How do violent conflicts shape cross-border lending? Using syndicated loan data on 14,021 creditors and 97,169 firms across 179 countries, we document a dual response. Relative to domestic creditors, foreign lenders reduce overall lending by 27% (supplydriven) but increase lending to...

Did Southern elites' economic losses from abolition translate into diminished political influence? Using novel census-linked data on state lawmakers across four slave-owning and two Northern states (1850-1880), we document a striking paradox: despite the massive wealth shock of emancipation, the...

Can violence erase an ethnic identity? We study this question using the Shining Path insurgency in Peru (1980-1992), which sought to replace competing affiliations with a single class identity and killed roughly 70,000 people, three-quarters of them Indigenous. Combining individual-level data on...

Did Southern elites' economic losses from abolition translate into diminished political influence? Using novel census-linked data on state lawmakers across four slave-owning and two Northern states (1850-1880), we document a striking paradox: despite the massive wealth shock of emancipation, the...

Many of the world's LDCs are plagued by recurring conflict. Conflict impedes sustainable development through various channels, creating conditions conducive to further conflict. Conflict has redistributive impacts, particularly when it erupts in resource-rich countries. Between 2002 and 2011,...

This paper empirically investigates the effects of Anti-Open Grazing Laws (AOGLs) on herder-farmer conflicts in Nigeria. The laws, enacted as a response to escalating violent conflicts over fertile land resources between herders and farmers, aimed to reduce clashes by prohibiting livestock...

Can past wartime experiences other than violence have long-term effects on political attitudes and behaviours? How are these legacies sustained across generations and beyond those who directly experienced war? We explore these questions in Italy, a country whose democratic institutions were...

In the early 2000s, the Colombian government aired messages during games of the national football team, urging FARC rebels to demobilize. We first study the strategy's effectiveness, leveraging game dates, kick-off times, and spatial-temporal variation in rain-induced signal strength in a...

Civil wars often erode state sovereignty, as institutions are replaced or co-opted by armed groups that establish informal governance structures. Among these, rebel taxation emerges as a key tool for financing wartime activities and administering territories. We explore whether rebel taxation...

Despite growing attention being paid to the societal impacts of violent conflict, little is known about how exposure thereto shapes gender attitudes, particularly in Africa. This study addresses that gap by examining the relationship between exposure to violent conflict and attitudes toward...

Ethnic federalism has long been a cornerstone of Ethiopia’s political system - and a recurrent source of violent conflict. Despite its centrality to the country’s governance and conflict dynamics, there is a notable absence of large-N quantitative research examining how exposure to violence...

Colombia’s prolonged conflict has made the country one of the most affected by forced internal displacement (FID) in the world. This study examines the impact of the FARC’s 2014 unilateral and permanent ceasefire on FID. We use a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the timing of...

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...

How do rebel groups incorporate locals into their economic systems, and how do these civil-military relations affect the political dynamics of armed conflicts? This study explores the economic institutions regulated by rebel groups in conflict areas and their impact on the duration of the...

How do violent conflicts shape cross-border lending? Using data on syndicated loans by 14,021 creditors to firms in 179 countries (1989-2020), we document a dual effect: foreign banks reduce overall lending relative to domestic banks but significantly increase financing to military and dual-use...

Wars fueled by resource wealth pose complex challenges for conflict resolution. I combine data on conflict events, rebel resource dependence, world market prices, and ceasefire details to investigate how fluctuations in rebel funding affect the likelihood of ceasefires. Increased funding...

The war in Sudan, which broke out on 15 April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has triggered the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. Civilians are being directly attacked by the warring parties. The violent actors are destroying...

We construct an index of composite inequality covering 193 countries worldwide. For a substantial and unprecedented number of countries, we can trace the long‐term evolution of inequality over 200 years, from 1810 to 2010. This composite index of inequality includes not only post‐tax income...

How can states rebuild fiscal capacity after a civil war? Trust in political institutions and trust in fellow citizens are cornerstones of tax compliance, necessary for a functioning fiscal contract. We posit that transitional justice (TJ) can influence both channels. We use a simple game of tax...