Natural Experiment

This paper asks whether creating new local districts—government fragmentation—affects local economic activity, using Indonesia’s large wave of district splits from 2000–2014 as a case. The authors exploit variation in the timing of district splits to estimate effects on district GDP and public spending patterns, and they compare outcomes for newly created (“child”) districts and their parents. The study’s central contribution is empirical evidence that fragmentation can reduce measured local GDP in the short run even when central transfers rise.

Authoritarian regimes may adopt meritocratic political selection not to expand redistribution but to co-opt large numbers of ordinary citizens by offering a credible path to socioeconomic advancement. This argument depends on the selection process being seen as inclusive and rule-based rather than arbitrary.

Many European countries have introduced mandatory integration courses for refugees. Evaluations often find short-term economic gains, but evidence on long-term social and political integration is limited.

Mass ritual gatherings like pilgrimages are central to religious life worldwide. This study asks whether participation in India's Kumbh Mela—the world's largest human assembly—translates into electoral gains for religious parties by heightening religiosity and by giving parties opportunities to organize and campaign around the events.

Personnel records were combined with vital-statistics data spanning 1910–1925 to measure mortality outcomes across 1,271 Indian towns during the 1918 influenza pandemic.

A substantial observational literature links collective victimhood to conflict-enhancing attitudes, but experimental evidence is mixed. This research revisits that puzzle in a context where increasing the salience of collective victimhood—the state-led framing around Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day—would be especially likely to change attitudes.

A sudden, local ban on sex work in one East Java district—unexpectedly imposed by local officials while neighboring districts stayed legal—creates a natural experiment to assess health and economic consequences. Data collected from female sex workers and their clients both before and after the policy change reveal substantial unintended harms.

This paper investigates the long-term development effects of colonial-era rubber concessions in the north of the Congo Free State. The concessions were arbitrarily bounded and combined private resource extraction with indirect rule and violence. The design uses these arbitrary concession borders to identify causal effects of that economic and political arrangement on present-day outcomes.

Lotteries are often proposed to allocate government benefits when demand outstrips supply: they can be simple, impartial, and can enable rigorous impact evaluations. Yet public acceptance of using lotteries for real-world beneficiary selection is not well understood.

Can tax regimes shape incentives to engage in armed conflict? This analysis links a central-government iron-ore tax reform to local violence and illegal extraction in India's Maoist belt.