To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

We study the effects of economic shocks on civil conflict at the subnational level using a panel data set of 5,689 administrative regions from 53 African countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2010. We find that economic shocks, measured by nighttime light intensity and instrumented by...