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.

Does the human rights spotlight impact multinationals? We evaluate the effect of publicizing human rights violations on firm value, focusing on salient events at the center of international campaigns: the assassination of environmental activists opposing multinational mining operations in the global periphery. We employ 20 years of data on activist deaths and use a financial event study methodology to estimate the impact of a human rights spotlight on the stock price of firms associated with this violence. We find that the human rights spotlight has a substantial effect. Firms named in assassination coverage have large, negative abnormal returns after these events, with a median loss in market capitalization of USD 100 million. We show that the media plays a key role in generating these effects; the negative impact of assassinations is strongest when they coincide with calm rather than saturated news cycles, in which news is less likely to reach investors. Our study highlights economic over non-pecuniary mechanisms. An association with violence negatively impacts supply chain contracts and provokes a negative reaction from institutional investors. Lastly, we show that assassinations are positively related to the royalties paid by mining projects to domestic governments.

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.

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 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.

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.