We examine the effect of oil price fluctuations on democratic institutions over the 1960-2007 period. We also exploit the very persistent response of income to oil price fluctuations to study the effect of persistent (oil price-driven) income shocks on democracy. Our results indicate that...

Estimamos los efectos de pares relacionados con el género en las escuelas explotando las diferencias en la composición de género entre cohortes de edad. Nuestro enfoque difiere de la literatura existente la cual se basa en diferencias en la composición entre cursos escolares adyacentes....

Insurance among the members of religious organizations should be more valuable in communities facing greater risk, making membership in religious organizations more attractive in high-risk environments. We examine the link between rainfall risk and church membership as well as seating capacity...

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Can agnostics rely on international income data to tell them which matter? We find that agnostic priors lead to conclusions that are sensitive to differences across available income estimates. For example, the PWT 6.2...

According to the economic approach to political transitions, transitory negative economic shocks can open a window of opportunity for democratic improvement. Testing the theory requires a source of transitory shocks to the aggregate economy. We use rainfall shocks in Sub-Saharan African...

To learn more about the effect of economic conditions on civil war, we examine whether Sub-Saharan civil wars are more likely to start following downturns in the international price of countries’ main export commodities. The data show a robust effect of commodity price downturns on the...