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Post-election violence is a common form of conflict, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Using data from the 2007 Philippine mayoral elections, this paper provides evidence that post-election violence is particularly intense after narrow victories by incumbents. Using a density test, the study shows that incumbents were substantially more likely to win narrow victories than their challengers, a pattern consistent with electoral manipulation. There is no evidence that the increase in post-election violence is related to the incumbents’ political platform or their performance in past elections. These results provide support for the notion that post-election violence is triggered by election fraud or by the failure of democratic ways of removing unpopular incumbents from office.

Many experts see a move toward high-value export crops, such as fruits and vegetables, as an important opportunity for economic growth and poverty reduction, but little is known about the effects of export crops in fragile and conflict-affected countries. We exploit movements in world market prices combined with geographic variation in crop production to show that increases in the value of bananas, the country’s biggest export crop, caused an increase in conflict violence and insurgent-controlled territory in the Philippines. This effect was concentrated in provinces where bananas are produced in large plantations with areas greater than 25 hectares. Our results are consistent with a mechanism in which insurgents fund their operations by extorting large agricultural export firms.

Climate change is predicted to affect global rainfall patterns, but there is mixed evidence with regard to the effect of rainfall on civil conflict. Even among researchers who argue that rainfall reduces civil conflict, there is disagreement as to the underlying mechanism. Using data from the Philippines for the period 2001-2009, we exploit seasonal variation in the relationship between rainfall and agricultural production to explore the connection between rainfall and civil conflict. In the Philippines, above-average rainfall during the wet season is harmful to agricultural production, while above-average rainfall during the dry season is beneficial. We show that the relationship between rainfall and civil conflict also exhibits seasonality, but in the opposite direction and with a one-year lag. Consistent with the hypothesis that rebel groups gain strength after a bad harvest, there is evidence that lagged rainfall affects the number of violent incidents initiated by insurgents but not the number of incidents initiated by government forces. Our results suggest that policies aimed at mitigating the effect of climate change on agricultural production could weaken the link between climate change and civil conflict.

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs are an increasingly popular tool for reducing poverty in conflict-affected areas. Despite their growing popularity, there is limited evidence on how CCT programs affect conflict and theoretical predictions are ambiguous. We estimate the effect of conditional cash transfers on civil conflict in the Philippines by exploiting an experiment that randomly assigned eligibility for a CCT program at the village level. We find that cash transfers caused a substantial decrease in conflict-related incidents in treatment villages relative to control villages in the first 9 months of the program. Using unique data on local insurgent influence, we also find that the program reduced insurgent influence in treated villages. An analysis of possible spillovers yields inconclusive results. While we find no statistical evidence of spillovers, we also cannot rule out that the village-level effect was due to displacement of insurgent activity from treatment to control villages.

We estimate the causal effect of a large development program on conflict in the Philippines through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary poverty threshold used to assign eligibility for the program. We find that barely eligible municipalities experienced a large increase in conflict casualties compared to barely ineligible ones. This increase is mostly due to insurgent-initiated incidents in the early stages of program preparation. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that insurgents try to sabotage the program because its success would weaken their support in the population. (JEL D74, F35, I32, I38, O15, O17, O18, O19)

The integrated assessment literature frequently replicates uncertainty by averaging Monte Carlo runs of deterministic models. This Monte Carlo analysis is, in essence, an averaged sensitivity analyses. The approach resolves all uncertainty before the first time period, drawing parameters from a distribution before initiating a given model run. This paper analyzes how closely a Monte Carlo based derivation of optimal policies is to the truly optimal policy, in which the decision maker acknowledges the full set of possible future trajectories in every period. Our analysis uses a stochastic dynamic programming version of the widespread integrated assessment model DICE, and focuses on damage uncertainty. We show that the optimizing Monte Carlo approach is not only off in magnitude, but can even lead to a wrong sign of the uncertainty effect. Moreover, it can lead to contradictory policy advice, suggesting a more stringent climate policy in terms of the abatement rate and a less stringent one in terms of the expenditure on abatement.

The fact that conflicts tend to cluster in space is well documented. It remains unclear, however, whether this clustering is a result of contagion or of unobserved shocks that are correlated across space. We present new evidence for contagion by exploiting a natural experiment that increased the intensity of one conflict but had no direct effect on a second ongoing conflict in the same area. In particular, we analyze a ruling by the Supreme Court of the Philippines, which disallowed a proposed peace treaty with the Moro-Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a Muslim separatist insurgency, and led to an escalation of conflict with the MILF in provinces with a large Muslim population. Though the ruling had no direct bearing on the conflict with the New People's Army (NPA), a communist guerrilla group, we find that it also led to a substantial increase in conflict with the NPA in the same provinces. We test several mechanisms and conclude that contagion was most likely the result of strategic escalation by the NPA in an attempt to exploit the local weakness of the armed forces.

Drawing on county-level data from Kansas for the period 1977-2011, we examine whether plausibly exogenous increases in the number of establishments licensed to sell alcohol by the drink are related to violent crime. During this period, 86 out of 105 counties in Kansas voted to legalize the sale of alcohol to the general public for on-premises consumption. We provide evidence that these counties experienced substantial increases in the total number of establishments with on-premises liquor licenses (e.g., bars and restaurants). Using legalization as an instrument, we show that a 10 percent increase in drinking establishments is associated with a 4 percent increase in violent crime. Reduced-form estimates suggest that legalizing the sale of alcohol to the general public for on-premises consumption is associated with an 11 percent increase in violent crime.

Previous studies have documented a positive association between election fraud and the intensity of civil conflict. It is not clear, however, whether this association is causal or due to unobserved institutional and cultural factors. This paper examines the relationship between election fraud and post-election violence in the 2007 Philippine mayoral elections. Using the density test developed by McCrary (2008), we find evidence that incumbents were able to win tightly contested elections through fraud. In addition, we show that narrow incumbent victories were associated with an increase in post-election casualties, which is consistent with the hypothesis that election fraud causes conflict. We conduct several robustness tests and find no evidence that incumbent victories increased violence for reasons unrelated to fraud.