Most separatist movements overlap with ethnic tensions and are associated with violent and economically destructive outcomes. In this paper, we consider a (largely) peaceful separatist movement. Specifically, we use the synthetic control method to study the economic consequences of the...

Machine learning tools are well known for their success in prediction. But prediction is not causation, and causal discovery is at the core of most questions concerning economic policy. Recently, however, the literature has focused more on issues of causality. This paper gently introduces some...