The energy transition increases the demand for minerals from ethnically diverse, conflict-prone developing countries. We study whether and where mining is possible in such countries without raising the risk of civil conflict. We proceed in three steps: First, we propose a theoretical model to...

The paper investigates social-learning when the information structure is not commonly known. Individuals repeatedly interact in social-learning settings with distinct information structures. In each round of interaction, they use their experience gained in past rounds to draw inferences from...

This paper investigates the economic fortunes of coerced vs. free workers in a global supply chain. To identify the differential treatment of otherwise similar workers we resort to a unique exogenous labor demand shock that affects wages in voluntary and involuntary labor relations differently....

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...

What is the long run impact on development from differences in subsistence strategies during pre-industrial times? Whereas this question has been explored from the point of view of agriculture, remarkably little attention has been paid to the complementary strategy of relying on marine...

We show that economies may exhibit a strong endogenous macroeconomic adaptation response to climate change. If climate change induces a structural change to the more productive sector, economies can benefit from climate change though productivities in both sectors are reduced. If climate change...

We study the capacity to meet food demand under conditions of climate change, economic and population growth. We take a novel approach to quantifying climate impacts, based on a model of the global economy structurally estimated on the period 1960 to 2015. The model integrates several features...

We analyze total, asymmetric and frequency connectedness between oil and forex markets using high-frequency, intra-day data over the period 2007 - 2017. By employing variance decompositions and their spectral representation in combination with realized semivariances to account for asymmetric and...

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...

We estimate the impact of local mining activity on the business constraints experienced by 22,150 firms across eight resource-rich countries. We find that with the presence of active mines, the business environment in the immediate vicinity (20 km) of a firm deteriorates but business constraints...