We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity's...

Tanah bengkok (bengkok land) in Java, Indonesia boasts a unique institution where elected village leaders receive usufruct rights to a parcel of land owned by the village, in lieu of salary. Despite its relevance to the political economy of land distribution in Java, unavailability of systematic...

We study the role of proximity to historical ethnic borders in determining individual land ownership in Sub-Saharan Africa. Following an instrumental variable strategy, we document that individuals have a lower likelihood of owning land near historical ethnic borders. In particular, the...

This paper extends the Baltagi et al. (2018, 2021) static and dynamic ?-contamination papers to dynamic space-time models. We investigate the robustness of Bayesian panel data models to possible misspecification of the prior distribution. The proposed robust Bayesian approach departs from the...

This paper argues that climate change poses two distinct, if related, sets of challenges for poor rural households: challenges related to the increasing frequency and severity of weather shocks and challenges related to long-term shifts in temperature, rainfall patterns, water availability, and...

How do people in developing countries respond to extreme temperatures? Using individual-level panel data over two decades and relying on plausibly exogenous variation in weather, we estimate how extreme temperatures affect time use in China. Extreme temperatures reduce time spent working, and...

We study the effects of extreme temperature shocks on political participation using data from Indian elections between 2009 and 2017. Taking advantage of localized, high-frequency data on land surface temperatures, we find that areas with greater cumulative exposure to extreme temperatures...

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...

Land requisition has been an important process by which Chinese local governments promote urbanization and generate revenue. This study investigates the impacts of land requisition on farmers' decisions of labor allocation between agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. We argue that,...

This paper assesses the impact of glyphosate use in agriculture on birth outcomes of human populations in surrounding areas. Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world. Still, despite ongoing controversy, little is known about its effects on human populations at large. Our...