Violent organizations are often providers of many social services in competition with the state. We provide evidence that these organizations use the provision of social services to gain support. ...This strategy is only effective when it fills the void left by a weak state. We show this by studying the provision of natural disaster relief by the Pakistani state and the Taliban. We first analyze the floods of 2010 that received an inadequate response from the government and show that support for the Taliban increased in the areas affected by the flood. These effects were concentrated in places where the Taliban likely provided help and where the state under-delivered. We then study the 2005 earthquake that instead received a swift government response and show that the Taliban lost support in the affected areas. Results cannot be explained by alternate mechanisms as anger against incumbents, political competition, electoral participation, and religiosity.
The debate over police use of military equipment often revolves around the supposed tradeoff between increasing police safety and reducing killings by the police. In this paper, I rely on ...institutional features that exogenously determine the distribution of military equipment to US police departments to show that, contrary to previous evidence, there is no such tradeoff: police militarization increases killings by the police and reduces police safety. Each year police militarization results in 64 additional killings by the police, 12,440 police officer assaults, and 2653 police officer injuries.
In the last generations most of the Western world has faced rapid secularization combined with large expansions in the welfare state. At the same time, many other countries have maintained high ...levels of religiosity and a more limited role for the state. I propose a model of intergenerational transmission of religious values and competition between the state and the church that shows how an increase in state efficiency can trigger this process of secularization and rise of the welfare state. At the same time, I show that this initial increase in state efficiency can be hard to attain. Due to the competition between the church and the state, agents may have incentives to sabotage the efficiency of the state, preventing the start of the secularization process. Finally, I provide empirical evidence in line with this model and show that consistent empirical results are only present when focusing on areas of the state that are in direct competition with the church.
Abstract
Using new data at the police department level, I propose an identification strategy for estimating the causal effect that police militarization has on reducing violent crime. I show that ...previous estimates are likely to be contaminated by unobserved factors that simultaneously determine militarization and violent crime. Upon addressing this issue, I find a point estimate that is 20 times larger than those estimated previously. I then find that one-fourth of the effect of militarization is due to the displacement of violent crime to neighboring areas. Police departments overmilitarize because they do not consider this externality. These new findings have significant implications for the policy debate concerning the costs and benefits of police militarization (JEL H56, H76, K42).
Abstract
Can political rallies affect the behavior of law enforcement officers toward racial minorities? Using data from 35 million traffic stops, we show that the probability that a stopped driver ...is Black increases by 5.74% after a Trump rally during his 2015–2016 campaign. The effect is immediate, specific to Black drivers, lasts for up to 60 days after the rally, and is not justified by changes in driver behavior. The effects are significantly larger among law enforcement officers whose estimated racial bias is higher at baseline, in areas that score higher on present-day measures of racial resentment, those that experienced more racial violence during the Jim Crow era, and in former slave-holding counties. Mentions of racial issues in Trump speeches, whether explicit or implicit, exacerbate the effect of a Trump rally among officers with higher estimated racial bias.
In this paper, we study how a positive economic shock to an illicit industry might foster migration. In 2010, a series of reforms to the U.S. health care system resulted in a shift in demand from ...legal opiates to heroin. This demand shock had considerable effects on Mexico, the main supplier of heroin consumed in the United States. We exploit variation in potential opium production at the municipal level in a difference-in-differences (DID) framework, which compares Mexican municipalities with different amounts of opium-suitable land before and after 2010. We find that people fled out of municipalities more suitable for opium production, many to areas close to the U.S. border and into the United States. This is due to the increase in violence and conflicts, as municipalities more suitable for opium became highly valuable to drug cartels. Overall, almost 95,000 people migrate within Mexico and 22,000 emigrate to the United States.
•Reforms to the US health system resulted in a demand increase for heroin.•This paper studies the effect of this demand surge on Mexico.•We compare municipalities with different amounts of opium-suitable land.•People fled out of municipalities more suitable for opium production.•This is due to the increase in violence and conflicts.
In this paper, we exploit micro data from the ECB survey of professional forecasters to examine the link between the characteristics of macroeconomic density forecasts (such as their location, ...spread, skewness, and tail risk) and density forecast performance. Controlling for the effects of common macroeconomic shocks, we apply cross-sectional and fixed effect panel regressions linking such density characteristics and density forecast performance. Our empirical results suggest that many macroeconomic experts could systematically improve their density performance by correcting a downward bias in their variances. Aside from this shortcoming in the second moment characteristics of the individual densities, other higher moment features, such as skewness or variation in the degree of probability mass given to the tails of the predictive distributions, tend—as a rule—not to contribute significantly to enhancing individual density forecast performance.
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