This paper  investigates the impact of childhood exposure to conflict on later political beliefs and engagement in 17 sub-Saharan African countries. Despite the well-documented “conflict trap” in which regions with histories of conflict are at higher risk of future conflicts, the study finds that exposure to conflict during childhood (ages 0-14) has minimal standardized effects on later political attitudes and behaviors. This result holds across various definitions, specifications, and data sources. While previous research has suggested that conflict disrupts economic growth and can perpetuate violence, this study suggests that these effects are not primarily driven by changes in political beliefs and engagement during childhood. The research provides insights into the resilience of individuals and communities in the aftermath of

This study examines the impact of workplace-based soft skills training on the productivity of Indian garment workers. The study finds that such training leads to significant productivity gains, with treated workers becoming 13.5% more productive than their untreated counterparts. These gains are particularly pronounced when trainees work in teams alongside their coworkers, emphasizing the importance of teamwork and collaboration skills. Interestingly, even untreated coworkers on the same production lines as the trained workers show increased productivity, suggesting positive spillover effects. However, despite the productivity improvements and higher promotion probabilities among trained workers, the study finds no effects on wages or worker retention, indicating labor market frictions. Nevertheless, the firm experiences substantial net returns, with a 256% return on investment

Racial segregation is a pernicious feature of life across America. Urban economists and economic historians have studied the forces behind residential segregation, zoning, and housing inequity (e.g., Boustan, 2011; Logan and Parman, 2017a,b). This paper explores another historically pervasive yet less-known institution for racial exclusion: the sundown town. In this paper, we first document the spread of sundown towns outside the South, giving rise to what Loewen (2005) termed a “Great Retreat” of Blacks from the U.S. interior. We then relate this pervasive racial exclusion to the Southern white diaspora (Gregory, 2005), rooted in the historical migration of Southern whites across the country following the Civil War (see Bazzi et al., 2021; Dippel, 2005). Lastly, we connect the presence

Pollution from wildfires constitutes a growing source of poor air quality globally. To protect health, governments largely rely on citizens to limit their own wildfire smoke exposures, but the effectiveness of this strategy is hard to observe. Using data from private pollution sensors, cell phones, social media posts and internet search activity, we find that during large wildfire smoke events, individuals in wealthy locations increasingly search for information about air quality and health protection, stay at home more and are unhappier. Residents of lower-income neighbourhoods exhibit similar patterns in searches for air quality information but not for health protection, spend less time at home and have more muted sentiment responses. During smoke events, indoor particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations often

We use a policy experiment in Indonesia to show how local political boundaries affect ethnic tension. Redrawing district borders along group lines reduces conflict. However, the gains in stability are undone or even reversed when new boundaries increase ethnic polarization. Greater polarization leads to more violence around majoritarian elections but has little effect around lower-stakes, proportional representation elections. These results point to distinct incentives for violence in winner-take-all settings with contestable public resources. Overall, our findings illustrate the promise and pitfalls of redrawing borders in diverse countries where it is infeasible for each group to have its own administrative unit.

We identify a form of gender-based governmental discrimination that directly affects billions of women on a daily basis: the setting of import tariffs for gendered goods. These tax rates, which can differ across otherwise identical gender-specific products, often impose direct penalties on women as consumers. Comparing nearly 200,000 paired tariff rates on men’s and women’s apparel products in 167 countries between 1995 and 2015, we find that women suffer a tax penalty that varies systematically across countries. We demonstrate that in democracies, women’s presence in the legislature is associated with decreased import tax penalties on women’s goods. This finding is buttressed by a comparison of democracies and non-democracies and analyses of the implementation of legislative gender quotas. Our work

Remotely sensed land surface temperature measurements are used to explore the distribution of the United States’ urban heating burden. Drawing on urban temperature anomalies during extreme summer surface temperature events from all 1,056 US counties with more than 10 developed census tracts, we find that the poorest tracts (and those with lowest average education levels) within a county are significantly hotter than the richest (and more educated) neighborhoods for 76% of these counties (54% for education); we also find that neighborhoods with higher Black, Hispanic, and Asian population shares are hotter than the more White, non-Hispanic areas in each county.

Shelter-in-place ordinances were the first wide-spread policy measures aimed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Compliance with shelter-in-place directives is individually costly and requires behavioral changes across diverse sub-populations. Leveraging county-day measures on population movement derived from cellphone location data and the staggered introduction of local mandates, we find that economic factors have played an important role in determining the level of compliance with local shelter-in-place ordinances in the US. Specifically, residents of low income areas complied with shelter-in-place ordinances less than their counterparts in areas with stronger economic endowments, even after accounting for potential confounding factors including partisanship, population density, exposure to recent trade disputes, unemployment, and other factors. Novel results on the local impact of the 2020

We use a population resettlement program in Indonesia to identify long-run effects of intergroup contact on national integration. In the 1980s, the government relocated two million ethnically diverse migrants into hundreds of new communities. We find greater integration in fractionalized communities with many small groups, as measured by national language use at home, intermarriage, and children’s name choices. However, in polarized communities with a few large groups, ethnic attachment increases and integration declines. Residential segregation dampens these effects. Social capital, public goods, and ethnic conflict follow similar patterns. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of localized contact in shaping identity.

Several recent studies link rising income inequality in the United States to the global financial crisis, arguing that US politicians did not respond to growing inequality with fiscal redistribution. Instead, Americans saved less and borrowed more to maintain relative consumption in the face of widening economic disparities. This article proposes a theory in which fiscal redistribution dampens the willingness of citizens to borrow to fund current consumption. A key implication is that pretax inequality will be more tightly linked with credit in less redistributive countries. The long-run partisan composition of government is, in turn, a key determinant of redistributive effort. Examining a panel of eighteen OECD democracies, the authors find that countries with limited histories of left-wing participation in