We empirically examine the impact of oil wealth on property rights protection for a sample of 156 countries between 1960 and 2014. We find that higher levels of oil wealth result in weaker private property rights. This result is robust to different instrumental-variable approaches and...

We empirically examine the impact of oil wealth on property rights protection for a sample of 156 countries between 1960 and 2014. We find that higher levels of oil wealth result in weaker private property rights. This result is robust to different instrumental-variable approaches and...

We provide evidence about the mechanisms linking resource-related income shocks to conflict. Combining temporal variation in international drug prices with spatial variation in the suitability to produce opium, we show that higher drug prices reduce conflict over the 2002-2014 period in...

We use a multilevel approach to characterize the relationship between weather shocks and (internal and international) migration intentions. We combine individual survey data on migration intentions with measures of localized weather shocks for Western African countries over 2008-2016. A...

Religious adherence has been hard to study in part because it is hard to measure. We develop a new measure of religious adherence, which is granular in both time and space, using anonymized mobile phone transaction records. After validating the measure with traditional data, we show how it can...

We re-examine the effects of negative weather anomalies during the growing season on the decision to migrate in rural households in five sub-Saharan African countries. To this end we combine a multi-country household panel dataset with high-resolution gridded precipitation data. We find that...

This paper investigates whether the COVID-19 crisis has affected the way we think about (political) institutions, as well as our broader (policy) attitudes and values. We fielded large online survey experiments in Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, well into the first wave of the...

We reconsider the relationship between oil and conflict, focusing on the location of oil resources. In a panel of 132 countries over the period 1962-2009, we show that oil windfalls increase the probability of conflict in onshore-rich countries, while they decrease this probability in...