David H. Kreitmeir

Can markets discipline socially costly misbehavior abroad? We explore the market penalty associated with major human rights violations—specifically, the assassination of mining activists, a context where formal legal recourse is rare and events often do not involve counterparties. We show that firms featured in media coverage of these incidents experience significant, negative abnormal stock returns. Whereas reactions to related forms of corporate misconduct may be transitory or muted, we find that the market responses are both substantial and persistent, with a median 10-day loss exceeding USD 100 million. Since formal legal sanction is exceedingly rare, we consider the role of market penalties. We highlight three mechanisms that are consistent with reputational costs: (1) Media attention magnifies the market response. (2) Information-sensitive institutional investors systematically divest following assassination events. (3) Events reduce future trade, leading to a 19% decline in new contracts with counterparties. Despite these costs, events persist. We find that assassinations increase with dependence on mining royalties, suggesting that local rents sustain conflict despite market pressure. Thus, reputational sanctions may be significant—even in weakly institutionalized settings—yet may not fully deter misbehavior when local and global incentives diverge.

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.

Over the past two decades, violence against land and environmental activists has been on the rise, besetting even stable democracies. Using a unique, fine-grained data set on social conflict events in Peru and exogenous variation in world mineral prices, I document a strong link between local mineral rents and violent state repression of socioenvironmental protests in a democratic institutional setting. I show that the increase in the use of excessive force cannot be explained by changes in protester behavior. Empirical findings highlight the role of local authorities: the election of a pro-mining mayor is associated with a higher prevalence of state repression and corruption in the constituency. The legal and democratic accountability of local authorities is, however, found to be limited. The reported increase in corruption does not translate into more investigations against pro-mining mayors for corruption offenses nor are reelection results of incumbents found to be negatively affected by state violence against protesters. Finally, I show that violent state repression is successful in forestalling conflict resolution agreements that acknowledge protesters’ demands.

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.