We show how uncertainty shapes the asset allocation, composition, productivity, and value of capital-intensive firms. We do so using detailed, near-universal data on shipping firms' new orders, secondary-market transactions, and demolition of ships. Firms curtail both the acquisition and...

This study estimates the effect of deployment location and length on the risk of developing PTSD, relative to what it would be from the normal military operations. We use a random sample of activity-duty enlisted personnel serving between 2001 and 2006. We identify PTSD cases from TRICARE...

We survey a representative sample of the U.S. population to understand stakeholders' desire to see their firms exit Russia after the invasion of Ukraine. 61% of respondents think that firms should exit Russia, regardless of the consequences. Only 37% think that leaving Russia is a purely...

We show that armed actors refrain from using their power to arbitrarily steal from an economy if, and only if, the armed actors' property rights over stealing from that economy are secure. By 2009, armed actors taxed, administered, and protected various villages in Democratic Republic of the...

How do elites mobilize commoners to participate in a war? How does war mobilization affect elite power after the war? We argue that these two questions are interconnected, as elites mobilize war often because war benefits them. We demonstrate these relationships using the setting of the...

We analyze the impact on crime of 3.7 million refugees who entered and stayed in Turkey as a result of the civil war in Syria. Using a novel administrative data source on the flow of offense records to prosecutors' offices in 81 provinces of the country each year, and utilizing the staggered...

The US Civil War ended in 1865 without the distribution of land or compensation to those formerly enslaved--a decision often seen as a cornerstone of racial inequality. We build a dataset to observe Black households' landholdings in 1880, a key component of their wealth, alongside a sample of...

Debilitating events could leave either frailer or more robust survivors, depending on the extent of scarring and mortality selection. The majority of empirical analyses find frailer survivors. I find heterogeneous effects. Among severely stressed former Union Army POWs, which effect dominates 35...

Miguel, Satyanath and Sergenti (2004) use rainfall variation as an instrument to show that economic growth is negatively related to civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. In the reduced form regression they find that higher rainfall is associated with less conflict. Ciccone (2010) claims that...

A recent paper by Burke et al. (henceforth "we") finds a strong historical relationship between warmer- than-average temperatures and the incidence of civil war in Africa (Burke et al. 2009). These findings have recently been challenged by Buhaug (2010) who finds fault with how we controlled for...