Political Economy

How do firms ensure secure exchange when the rule of law is weak and contracting institutions privilege the politically connected?

We use original data on the locations of militant commanders, attacks on the petroleum industry, and oil theft to show that a 2009 amnesty concluding the Niger Delta oil conflict led to sustained declines in militant activity and growth in oil theft.

We provide evidence that violence reduces the adoption and use of mobile money in three separate empirical settings in Afghanistan. First, analyzing nationwide mobile money transaction logs, we find that users exposed to violence reduce use of mobile money.

Existing theories of democratic reversals emphasize that elites mount actions like coups when democracy is particularly threatening to their interests.

What would happen if a poor country were to be integrated with a richer neighbor? Our analysis of the reunification of South and North Korea shows convergence of income between countries but divergence within.

This paper, by He, Wang and Zhang (2020), estimates the effect of environmental regulation on firm productivity using a spatial regression discontinuity design implicit in China's water quality monitoring system.

Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in many parts of the world, they are not publicly guaranteed.

A positive demand shock for coltan, a mineral whose bulky output cannot be concealed, leads armed actors to create illicit customs and provide protection at coltan mines, where they settle as “stationary bandits.” A similar shock for gold, easy to conceal,