Lebanon is the country with the highest density of refugees in the world, raising the question of whether the host and refugee populations can cooperate harmoniously. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment in Lebanon studying intra- and inter-group behavior of Syrian refugees and Lebanese...

This paper revisits an important analysis of enterprise zones (EZs) by Ham, Swenson, İmrohoroğlu, and Song (2011), who report substantial poverty reductions from state and federal EZs, as well as improvements in other labor market outcomes. In our re-analysis, we find that a data error...

Violence in Mexico has reached unprecedented levels in recent times. After the government began a crackdown on drug cartels, nation-wide homicides almost tripled between 2006 and 2010. Using rich longitudinal plant-level data, this paper studies the impact of violent conflict on firms,...

We examine two factors that help explain the prevalence of conflict in low-income countries: that adversaries cannot enforce long-term contracts in arms, and that open conflict alters the future strategic positions of the adversaries differently than does peace. Using an infinite horizon model,...

I critically review recent studies that estimate those costs of violence and conflict that can emerge among organized political groupings, from states, religious and ethnic organizations to guerillas and paramilitaries. The review includes studies that estimate direct and indirect costs due to...

In this study, we look at the association between COVID-19 fatality rate and internal conflict, highlighting the importance of government economic support under the pandemic as a moderating factor. Our main hypothesis implies that increased COVID-19 fatality rates are likely to be positively...

This paper studies how an increase in the number of armed groups operating within an area affects the amount of organized political violence. We use plausible exogenous variation in the number of armed groups in Pakistan, by exploiting the split of a major group due to the natural death of its...

Under extraterritorial sanctions the sanctioning country extends its policies to trade of third countries with the sanctioned country. A prominent example is former US President Trump’s decision to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a multilateral agreement with Iran. The...

We study the effect of a corruption reflection index on internal conflict in Iran using a novel measure of corruption based on newspaper coverage. We use the Vector Autoregression (VAR) model and its applied tools of impulse response and variance decomposition analyses to track the response of...

Entrepreneurs are often situated in extreme environments characterized by violent conflict. Yet, war is largely a blind spot in entrepreneurship scholarship. As a first step to closing this gap, we offer a well-identified synthetic control study of entrepreneurial dynamics in the Russo-Ukrainian...