Biotic factors such as pests create biodiversity effects that increase production risks and decrease land productivity when agriculture becomes more specialized. We show in a Ricardian two-country trade setup that production specialization is incomplete under free trade because of the decrease...

Studies that examine the impact of food prices on conflict usually assume that (all) changes in international food prices are exogenous shocks for individual countries or local areas. By isolating strictly exogenous shifts in global food commodity prices, we show that this assumption could...

We study the effect of large-scale land acquisitions on the risk of ethnic tensions for a sample of 133 countries for the 2000-2012 period. Running a series of fractional response models, we find that more land grabbing activity is associated with a higher risk of ethnic tensions, indicating...

Large-scale land acquisitions often take place in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendliness caused by weak institutional frameworks. We hypothesize that corruption indeed leads to more land deals. We argue that corrupt elites exploit poor institutional setups...

This paper analyses the determinants of short-term inflation expectations based on surveys of professionals, using dynamic cross-country panel estimation for a large number of 34 OECD economies. We find that food consumer price inflation and depreciations of the domestic exchange rate have...

Using time-varying BVARs, we find that oil price increases caused by oil supply shocks did not affect food commodity prices before the start of the millennium, but had positive spillover effects in more recent periods. Likewise, shortfalls in global food commodity supply - resulting from bad...

This paper studies exchange rate pass-through to food and energy consumer price inflation and its dependence on the inflation environment using cross-country panel estimation of Phillips curves. It considers a large panel of OECD member and candidate economies with quarterly data from 1994 to...

We study how precipitation has affected food consumer price inflation (CPI), using dynamic panel estimation of food CPI Phillips curves across countries for 34 OECD member and candidate economies from 1985 to 2010 augmented with climate variables. We allow for nonlinear effects of precipitation...

In 1992 the General Accounting Office (GAO) published a quantitative survey of Indian land ownership of twelve reservations, which was the first and still is the only survey of Indian land ownership. In our study we use 2010 data to show how ownership fractionation for these reservations has...

Land conflicts in developing countries are costly. An important policy goal is to create respect for borders. This often involves mandatory, expensive interventions. We propose a new policy design, which in theory promotes neighborly relations at low cost. A salient feature is the option to...