This study uses a unique and fine-grained data set on social conflict events in Peru and exogenous variation in world mineral prices to show that a surge in projected local mineral rents increases the probability of violent confrontations between protesters and national police. A 10% increase in the main mineral price has no effect on protester riots, but leads to a 1.9-percentage-point increase in the probability of injuries among protesters and a 0.7-percentage-point increase in the probability of a protester being killed. In addition, I provide suggestive evidence of political capture of the judicial process and limited democratic accountability. Narrowly elected pro-mining candidates are more likely to face initial investigations for corruption in office while there exists no difference in the probability of formal charges being levied against them. I, further, show that the incumbency advantage–-one facet of accountability–-is not affected by police violence during a mayor’s tenure. Finally, I provide evidence suggestive of the efficacy of police violence in forestalling official conflict resolution agreements that acknowledge protesters’ demands.

This paper revisits the predicted mortality instrument introduced in the seminal study of Acemoglu and Johnson (2007). Drawing on a unique historical data set of disease-specific mortality rates, we reconstruct several versions of the instrument that differ in terms of data usage and instrument relevance. Our findings confirm its predictive power on life expectancy. The replication analysis reveals a significant positive second-stage effect of life expectancy on population and total birth rates, and a negative effect on GDP per capita for a subset of the revised instruments. Overall, data coverage and empirical tests suggest the superiority of our country-level instrument.

Civil society plays a critical role in governance where laws and authority are weak. We study how a key strategy of international civil society—disseminating information about human rights abuse— impacts multinationals. We consider trends at the center of international campaigns: the assassination of activists, and collect 20 years of data related to murders tied to the global mining sector. Using event study methodology, we estimate the impact of the human rights spotlight on the stock price of firms connected to events. We find that the effect of the human rights spotlight is substantial. Firms named in assassination coverage have large, negative abnormal returns following assassinations. Our estimates imply a median loss in market capitalization of 100 million USD. Meanwhile, these events do not impact the social responsibility (ESG) scores of firms. We show that the media plays a crucial role in these effects: the negative impact of assassinations is strongest when they coincide with calm news cycles versus peak news cycles, when news may be crowded out by large, international stories. In addition, we argue our results are driven by events where companies are explicitly named in the reporting. Last, we show that assassinations are positively related to the royalties paid by mining projects to domestic governments.

We analyse the individual productivity effects of Italy’s ban on ChatGPT, a generative pretrained transformer chatbot. We compile data on the daily coding output quantity and quality of over 36,000 GitHub users in Italy and other European countries and combine these data with the sudden announcement of the ban in a difference-in-differences framework. Among the affected users in Italy, we find a short-term increase in output quantity and quality for less experienced users and a decrease in productivity on more routine tasks for experienced users.

This study both theoretically and empirically reinvestigates whether population growth causes conflict. Combining disease-specific historic mortality rates of Kreitmeir and Überfuhr (2023) with novel data on age-group–specific mortality rates and the timing of the demographic transition, we provide new evidence for the systematic heterogeneity in the effect of population on conflict. While Malthusian population dynamics can cause conflict, we find that this effect is restricted to countries that have not yet completed the demographic transition. On the other hand, health-induced population changes are shown to have a peace dividend in post-transitional countries. Separating the population size and youth bulge effect in an 2SLS estimation framework, moreover, confirms the non-monotonic population effect but reveals a global positive effect of youth bulges on conflict.

This project introduces a novel geocoded dataset on Chinese overseas mining and exploration projects. We construct a firm-commodity-mine level dataset by 1) identifying the set of overseas mining projects from official records from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce website, 2) coding their geolocation, project owners, and commodities, and 3) linking the project owners to administrative firm-level datasets from China, including firm-commodity-year level customs records. The result is the most comprehensive and granular dataset on Chinese overseas mining projects to date, allowing us to provide new empirical insights into the process behind China’s mining investments and their economic and social impact in the host countries.