Can workfare programmes moderate violence?

It is common in developing countries for income shocks to trigger spurts of violence. Important findings suggest that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s Rural Employment Guarantee (MNREGA) programme has had a moderating effect on the intensity and incidence of terrorist violence in Indi

Can workfare programmes moderate violence? Evidence from India

Thiemo Fetzer explores whether rural employment schemes under MGNREGA can have a moderating impact on insurgency violence

Austerity swung voters to Brexit – and now they are changing their minds

The voters most badly hit by austerity cuts were those drawn to UKIP and who supported Leave in the EU referendum, argues Thiemo Fetzer (University of Warwick). Recent polling evidence suggests that it is these same voters who are now changing their minds about Brexit

Is the UK having a rethink on Brexit?

Much has been made of the potential for a second referendum on Brexit, but have the British public changed their minds since 2016? Drawing on recent polling data, Thiemo Fetzer writes that there is an observable shift away from support for Brexit. This is happening along a key characteristic: how exposed a local authority district was to austerity in relation to the welfare reforms enacted since 2010

Subsidizing the spread of COVID19 : evidence from the UK’s Eat-Out to-Help-Out scheme

This paper documents that a large-scale government subsidy aimed at encouraging people to eat out in restaurants in the wake of the first 2020 COVID19 wave in the United Kingdom has had a large causal impact in accelerating the subsequent second COVID19 wave. The scheme subsidized 50% off the cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks for an unlimited number of visits in participating restaurants on Mondays-Wednesdays from August 3 to August 31, 2020. Areas with higher take-up saw both, a notable increase in new COVID19 infection clusters within a week of the scheme starting, and again, a deceleration in infections within two weeks of the program ending. Areas that exhibit notable rainfall during the prime lunch and dinner hours on days the scheme was active record lower infection incidence – a pattern that is also measurable in mobility data – and non-detectable on days during which the discount was not available or for rainfall outside the core lunch and dinner hours. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that the program is accountable for between 8 to 17 percent of all new local infection clusters during that time period

Market structure and borrower welfare in microfinance

Motivated by recent controversies surrounding the role of commercial lenders in microfinance, we analyze borrower welfare under different market structures, considering a benevolent non-profit lender, a for-profit monopolist, and a competitive credit market. To understand the magnitude of the effects analyzed, we simulate the model with parameters estimated from the MIX Market database. Our results suggest that market power can have severe implications for borrower welfare, while despite possible information frictions competition typically delivers similar borrower welfare to non-profit lending. In addition, for-profit lenders are less likely to use joint liability than non-profits

Cohesive institutions and political violence

Can institutionalized transfers of resource rents be a source of civil conflict? Are cohesive institutions better in managing distributive conflicts? We study these questions exploiting exogenous variation in revenue disbursements to local governments together with new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria. We make three contributions. First, we document the existence of a strong link between rents and conflict far away from the location of the actual resource. Second, we show that distributive conflict is highly organized involving political militias and concentrated in the extent to which local governments are non-cohesive. Third, we show that democratic practice in form having elected local governments significantly weakens the causal link between rents and political violence. We document that elections (vis-a-vis appointments), by producing more cohesive institutions, vastly limit the extent to which distributional conflict between groups breaks out following shocks to the available rents. Throughout, we confirm these findings using individual level survey data

Tariffs and politics : evidence from Trump’s Trade Wars

We use the recent trade escalation between the USA and its trade partners to study whether retaliatory tariffs are politically targeted. We find comprehensive evidence using individual and aggregate voting data suggesting that retaliation is carefully targeted to hurt Trump. We develop a simulation approach to construct counterfactual retaliation responses allowing us to quantify the extent of political targeting while also studying potential trade-offs. China appears to place great emphasis on achieving maximal political targeting. The EU seems to have been successful in maximising political targeting while at the same time minimising the potential damage to its economy

On the comparative advantage of U.S. manufacturing:evidence from the shale gas revolution

This paper provides the first empirical evidence of the newly found comparative advantage of the United States manufacturing sector following the so-called shale gas revolution. The revolution has led to (very) large and persistent differences in the price of natural gas between the United States and the rest of the world owing to the physics of natural gas. Results show that U.S. manufacturing exports have grown by about 6 percent on account of their energy intensity since the onset of the shale revolution. We also document that the U.S. shale revolution is operating both at the intensive and extensive margins