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This paper shows how ethnic identities may become more salient due to natural resources extraction. We combine individual data on the strength of ethnic—relative to national—identities with geo-localised information on the contours of ethnic homelands, and on the timing and location of mineral resources exploitation in 25 African countries, from 2005 to 2015. Our strategy takes advantage of several dimensions of exposure to resources exploitation: time, spatial proximity and ethnic proximity. We find that the strength of an ethnic group identity increases when mineral resource exploitation in that group’s historical homeland intensifies. We argue that this result is at least partly rooted in feelings of relative deprivation associated with the exploitation of the resources. We show that such exploitation has limited positive economic spillovers, especially for members of the indigenous ethnic group; and that the link between mineral resources and the salience of ethnic identities is reinforced among members of powerless ethnic groups and groups with strong baseline identity feelings or living in poorer areas, or areas with a history of conflict. Put together, these findings suggest a new dimension of the natural resource curse: the fragmentation of identities, between ethnic groups and nations.

Cette contribution traite des conséquences possibles sur la fréquence et le nombre des conflits dans le monde de la diffusion de la COVID-19 et des politiques restrictives qu’elle a engendrées dans de nombreux pays. Partant de données anecdotiques et de recherches récentes, ce texte vise à montrer que les mesures de confinement généralisées imposées par les États ont eu pour effet, en général, de réduire le nombre d'évènements liés à des conflits, mais que cette baisse peut être temporaire et très hétérogène d’un État à l’autre. En particulier, les phénomènes violents ne semblent pas décliner dans les pays pauvres et divisés. Les données tendent à montrer que les politiques de restriction liées à la COVID-19 pourraient accroitre les conflits de deux manières : la perte de revenus et l’amplification des tensions ethniques et religieuses transformant les minorités en boucs émissaires. This chapter discusses the potential impacts of the spread of COVID-19, and the restriction policies that it has triggered in many countries, on conflict incidence worldwide. Based on anecdotal evidence and recent research, we argue that imposing nation-wide shutdown policies diminishes conflict incidence on average, but that this conflict reduction may be short-lived and highly heterogeneous across countries. In particular, conflict does not appear to decline in poor, fractionalised countries. Evidence points to two potential ways in which COVID-related restriction policies may increase conflict: losses in income and magnified ethnic and religious tensions leading to scapegoating of minorities.

International audience

International audience; We provide real-time evidence on the impact of Covid-19 restrictions policies on conflicts globally. We combine daily information on conflict events and government policy responses to limit the spread of coronavirus to study how conflict levels vary following shutdown and lockdown policies. We use the staggered implementation of restriction policies across countries to identify their effect on conflict incidence and intensity. Our results show that imposing a nationwide shutdown reduces the likelihood of daily conflict by around 9 percentage points. The reduction is driven by a drop in the incidence of battles, protests and violence against civilians. Across actors the decline is significant for conflicts involving political militias, protesters and civilians. We also observe a significant cross-country heterogeneity in the effect of restriction policies on conflict: no conflict reduction is observed in low income countries and in societies more fractionalized along ethnic or religious lines. We discuss the potential channels that can explain this heterogeneity.

How to allocate limited resources among children is a crucial household decision, especially in developing countries where it might have strong implications for children and family survival. We study how variations in parental income in the early life of their children affect subsequent child health and parental investments across siblings, using micro data from multiple waves of the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) spanning 54 developing countries. Variations in the world prices of locally produced crops are used as measures of local income. We find that children born in periods of higher income durably enjoy better health and receive better human capital (health and education) investments than their siblings. Children whose older siblings were born during favourable income periods receive less investment and exhibit worse health in absolute terms. We interpret these within-household reallocations in light of economic and evolutionary theories that highlight the importance of efficiency considerations in competitive environments. Finally, we study the implications of these for aggregate child health inequality, which is found to be higher in regions exposed to more volatile crop prices.

This paper studies the determinants of pricing-to-market at the firm-level, with a particular focus on the role of firm-specific and policy-induced market power. We use a large dataset containing export values and quantities by product and destination for all exporting firms in 12 developing and emerging countries, over several years. We first show that firms in our sample do price to market, i.e. significantly adjust their unit values in home currency in response to exchange- rate variations. The extent of pricing-to-market is quantitatively limited but highly significant and homogenous across origin countries despite their very different levels of development. We then study how firm performance and trade policy affect pricing-to-market at the firm-level. We find that within a given origin-destination-product cell, large, high-performance exporters price more to market. More importantly, we identify significant effects of trade-policy instruments on pricing-to- market: Higher import tariffs on a destination market are associated with less pricing-to-market, whereas non-tariff measures are associated with more. These results are consistent with models where pricing-to-market is increasing in firm size and market share, and suggest that trade pol- icy has deep effects on market power, the direction of which depends on the type of instrument used.

Using a French firm-level database that combines balance-sheet and product-destination-specific export information over the period 1995-2001, we study the interconnections between exports and domestic sales. We identify exogenous shocks that affect the firms' demand on foreign markets to instrument yearly variations in exports. We use alternatively as instruments product-destination specific imports or tariffs changes, and large foreign shocks such as financial crises or civil wars. Our results show that exogenous variations in foreign sales are positively associated with domestic sales, even after controlling for changes in domestic demand. A 10% exogenous increase in exports generates a 1 to 3% increase in domestic sales in the short-term. This result is robust to various estimation techniques, instruments, controls, and sub-samples. We provide empirical evidence suggesting that this positive effect of exogenous changes in exports on domestic sales is related to a relaxation of short-run liquidity constraints.

We use a French firm-level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1994-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) R&D investment is countercyclical without credit constraints, but it becomes procyclical as firms face tighter credit constraints; (ii) this result is only observed for firms in sectors that depend more heavily upon external finance, or that are characterized by a low degree of asset tangibility; (iii) in more credit-constrained firms, R&D investment plummets during recessions but does not increase proportionally during upturns.

This paper uses detailed information on the latitude and longitude of conflict events within a set of Sub-Saharan African countries to study the impact of external income shocks on the likelihood of violence. We consider a number of external demand shocks faced by the country or the regions within countries - changes in the world demand of agricultural commodities, financial crises in the partner countries or changes in foreign trade policy - and combine these with information reflecting the natural level of trade openness of the location. We find that (i) within-country, the incidence, intensity and onset of conflicts are generally negatively and significantly correlated with income shocks within locations; (ii) this relationship is significantly weaker for the most remote locations, i.e those located away from the main seaports, (iii) at country-level, we cannot detect any significant effect of these shock on conflict incidence or onset; but (iv) large and longlasting shocks seem to affect the location of conflict outbreaks. In general, our results suggest that external income shocks are important determinants of the intensity and geography of conflicts within countries. However, conflicts tend to start in remote locations which are naturally less affected by foreign shocks, which might explain why these seem to have little effect on conflict onset at the country-level.

Using a large firm-level database containing information on export flows of French firms by destination, over the period 1995-2005, we study the impact of exporter dynamics on their future productivity growth. Our empirical strategy allows to control for reverse causality problems that arise when considering the export-productivity relationship. We first find that neither entry on the export market, nor the capacity of firms to remain exporters have a significant impact on their productivity growth. Second, we show that the dynamics of the exporting activity, i.e. post-entry export growth, has a positive impact on future productivity growth. Third, this positive impact of exporting is only observed in more dependent sectors upon external finance. We therefore provide suggestive evidence that a positive export dynamics affects productivity growth because it acts both as (i) an incentive to innovate, by increasing the expected return to innovation; (ii) a means to innovate, by relaxing liquidity constraints. Finally, by showing that only a few successful, dynamic exporters may enjoy important productivity gains through entry into the export market, our results explain why past empirical studies generally failed to find a significant effect of export participation on firms' productivity.

This paper analyzes the reaction of exporters to exchange rate changes. We present a model where, in the presence of distribution costs in the export market, high and low productivity firms react differently to a depreciation. Whereas high productivity firms optimally raise their markup rather than the volume they export, low productivity firms choose the opposite strategy. Hence, pricing to market is both endogenous and heterogenous. This heterogeneity has important consequences for the aggregate impact of exchange rate movements. The presence of fixed costs to export means that only high productivity firms can export, firms which precisely react to an exchange rate depreciation by increasing their export price rather than their sales. We show that this selection effect can explain the weak impact of exchange rate movements on aggregate export volumes. We then test the main predictions of the model on a very rich French firm level data set with destination-specific export values and volumes on the period 1995-2005. Our results confirm that high performance firms react to a depreciation by increasing their export price rather than their export volume. The reverse is true for low productivity exporters. Pricing to market by exporters is also more pervasive in sectors and destination countries with higher distribution costs. Consistent with our theoretical framework, we show that the probability of firms to enter the export market following a depreciation increases. The extensive margin response to exchange rate changes is modest at the aggregate level because firms that enter, following a depreciation, are smaller relative to existing firms.

Standard theoretical models would predict that a currency depreciation generates an increase in net exports. However, recent emerging market crises, accompanied by sharp exchange rate devaluations, have often been followed by a fall in or a stagnation of exports. This paper provides a simple theoretical framework which shows that a currency crisis affects trade through (i) a competitiveness effect, i.e. a variation in relative prices, that positively influences the intensive margin of trade (the amount of exports by firms); (ii) a balance-sheet effect, i.e. a modification of the fixed cost of exports, which negatively affects the extensive margin of trade (the number of exporters). We derive from our model a gravity-like equation of bilateral sectoral trade which we estimate using data on 27 industries and 32 countries over the period 1976-2002. First, we find that these events have a long-lasting negative impact on exports - which remain below their natural level for five years. We present evidence suggesting that this persistent effect is due to the combination of firms’ foreign currency borrowing and fixed costs of exports, which leads to important balance-sheet problems in the aftermath of the crisis. Second, the net effect of crises on exports largely depends on country specialization: the positive competitiveness effect is magnified by a specialization in high elasticity of substitution’s industries, while negative balance-sheets effects are exacerbated in industries more dependent upon external finance, in which assets are more tangible, or in high fixed costs sectors.

We use a French firm-level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is countercyclical without credit constraints, but it becomes less countercyclical as firms face tighter credit constraints; (ii) this result is magnified for firms in sectors that depend more heavily upon external finance, or that are characterized by a low degree of asset tangibility ; (iii) in more credit constrained firms, R&D investment share plummets during recessions but does not increase proportionally during upturns; (iv) average R&D investment and productivity growth are more negatively correlated with sales volatility in more credit constrained firms., Cette note analyse la relation entre les contraintes de crédit et l'investissement en R&D des entreprises le long de leur cycle d'affaire. Elle exploite l'appariement de deux bases de l'observatoire des entreprises de la Banque de France formant un large panel d'entreprises de toutes tailles sur la période 1993-2004. Les principaux résultats sont : (i) la part des investissements en R&D dans l'investissement total est contra-cyclique en l'absence de contraintes de crédit, mais il devient plus pro-cyclique lorsque les entreprises font face à des contraintes de crédit plus strictes ; (ii) le résultat est plus marqué dans les secteurs où les entreprises dépendent fortement definancements externes ; (iii) dans les entreprises les plus contraintes, la part des investissements en R&D plonge en cas de récession, mais ne se rattrape pas proportionnellement lors des reprises ; (iv) les investissements en R&D et la croissance de la productivité moyens sont plus négativement corrélés à la volatilité des ventes dans les entreprises les plus contraintes.