The Arab Spring has led to very different outcomes across the Arab world. I present a highly stylized model of the Arab Spring to better understand these differences. In this model, dictators from the ethnic or religious majority group concede power if their country is oil-poor, but can stay in...

This paper proposes an answer to the question of why social unrest sometimes occurs in the wake of an IMF Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). Under certain circumstances, partly determined by a country's comparative advantage, a nation’s elite may have an incentive to make transfers to 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...

We study the effect of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath on migration intentions of the Egyptian youth. We measure revolution intensity using the spacial variation in the number of deaths during the revolution from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution Wikithawra and...

This study examines the causal joint effect of a new political regime and war against Iraq on life expectancy of Iranians for the period 1978–1988 during the revolution and war. I use a synthetic control approach to construct a synthetic Iran based on a weighted average of other Middle East...

Existing research has pointed to the decreasing effect of revolutions and wars on income inequality. It is unclear whether this reduction is the result of ongoing changes within countries before revolutions and wars or if the results are standalone effects. In this study, we focus on the case of...

This article explains the purpose, reasons and size of revisions in German national accounts. It presents the results of the revision carried out in the summer of 2022 for the past four reporting years and describes special features, including those caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The paper studies whether a drought in 1788 affected the outbreak of peasant revolts during the French Revolution. I construct a community-level data set with information on local drought severity and peasant uprisings in 1789. Results indicate that those more affected by the drought more often...