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Can tax regimes shape the incentives of governments to engage in armed conflict? India’s Maoist belt contains a large share of the country’s most valuable mineral deposits. Indian mining royalties benefit the States, but they are set by the central government. States are largely responsible for counter-insurgency operations within their territory. Therefore, the royalty regime could shape the incentive of states to support counter-insurgency efforts. This paper exploits the introduction of a 10% ad valorem tax on iron ore that was responsible for a 10-fold increase in royalty collections by the affected State governments. In a panel of district-level violence outcomes between 2007 and 2013, we find that the royalty hike was followed by a significant intensification of violence in districts with iron ore deposits compared to other areas. We also show that the higher royalty rates are followed by an increase in illegal mining activity, suggesting that the control of mineral resources underpins the observed intensification in violence.

Misinformation is hypothesized to be more heavily monetized than other kinds of online content. We test this hypothesis with several scalable measures of website monetization. We examine over 400,000 links shared in more than 400 vaccine-related Facebook groups/pages, comparing anti-vaccine venues to pro-vaccine venues. Contrary to expectations, websites promoted in pro-vaccine venues are more monetized than those promoted in anti-vaccine venues. This is a consequence of the heavy monetization of news websites -- pro-vaccine venues are roughly 1.7 times more likely to share links to news. The specific news sites shared by anti-vaccine venues are rated less credible by fact-checking organizations, but we find no significant differences in monetization. However, non-news sites, such as blogs, shared by anti-vaccine actors were significantly more monetized. These results emphasize the need to interpret measures of monetization within the context of the broader "attention economy."

Since 2015, there has been a huge increase in laws that ostensibly seek to counter misinformation. Since the pandemic began, this trend has only accelerated. Both authoritarian and democratic gover...

Scholars of civil war and insurgency have long posited that insurgent organizations and their state enemies incur costs for the collateral damage they cause. We provide the first direct quantitative evidence that wartime informing to counterinsurgent forces is affected by civilian victimization. Using newly declassified data on tip flow to Coalition forces in Iraq we find that information flow goes down after government forces inadvertently kill civilians and it goes up when insurgents do so. These results confirm a relationship long posited in the theoretical literature on insurgency but never directly observed, have strong policy implications, and are consistent with a broad range of circumstantial evidence on the topic.

Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including a total of 44,260 individuals. We find considerably higher willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine in our LMIC samples (mean 80.3%; median 78%; range 30.1 percentage points) compared with the United States (mean 64.6%) and Russia (mean 30.4%). Vaccine acceptance in LMICs is primarily explained by an interest in personal protection against COVID-19, while concern about side effects is the most common reason for hesitancy. Health workers are the most trusted sources of guidance about COVID-19 vaccines. Evidence from this sample of LMICs suggests that prioritizing vaccine distribution to the Global South should yield high returns in advancing global immunization coverage. Vaccination campaigns should focus on translating the high levels of stated acceptance into actual uptake. Messages highlighting vaccine efficacy and safety, delivered by healthcare workers, could be effective for addressing any remaining hesitancy in the analyzed LMICs., Survey data collected across ten low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America compared with surveys from Russia and the United States reveal heterogeneity in vaccine confidence in LMICs, with healthcare providers being trusted sources of information, as well as greater levels of vaccine acceptance in these countries than in Russia and the United States.

Different types of bankruptcy restructuring procedures are used in most legal systems to decide the fate of businesses facing financial hardship. We study how bargaining failures in an under- researched type of restructuring procedure, a formal out-of-the court procedure impacts the economic performance of participating firms. Croatia introduced a “pre bankruptcy settlement” (PBS) process in the wake of the Great Recession of 2007 - 2009. A novel dataset provides us with annual financial statements for both sides of more than 180, 000 debtor-creditor pairs, enabling us to address selection into failed negotiations by matching a rich set of creditor and debtor characteristics. Failures to settle at the PBS stage due to idiosyncratic bargaining problems, which effectively delay entry into the standard bankruptcy procedure, lead to a lower rate of survival among debtors as well as reduced employment, revenue, and profits. We are the first study to track how bargaining failures diffuse through the network of creditors, finding a significant negative effect on small creditors, but not others. Our results highlight the impact of delay and the importance of structuring bankruptcy procedures, to rapidly resolve uncertainty about firms’ future prospects.

The movement of many human interactions to the internet has led to massive volumes of text that contain high-value information about individual choices pertaining to risk and uncertainty. But unlocking these texts’ scientific value is challenging because online texts use slang and obfuscation, particularly so in areas of illicit behavior. Utilizing state-of-the-art techniques, we extract a range of variables from more than 30 million online ads for real-world sex over four years, data significantly larger than that previously developed. We establish prices in a common numeraire and study the correlates of pricing, focusing on risk. We show that there is a 15-19% price premium for services performed at a location of the buyer’s choosing (outcall). Examining how this premium varies across cities and service venues (i.e. incall vs. outcall) we show that most of the variation in prices is likely driven by supply-side decision making. We decompose the price premium into travel costs (75%) and the remainder that is strongly correlated with local violent crime risk. Finally, we show that sex workers demand compensating differentials for the risk that are on par with the very riskiest legal jobs; an hour spent with clients is valued at roughly $151 for incall services compared to an implied travel cost of $36/hour. These results show that offered prices in the online market for real-world sex are driven by the kinds of rational decision-making common to most pricing decisions and demonstrate the value of applying machine reading technologies to complex online text corpora.

Easier said than done High-profile instances of police brutality in the last few years have brought attention to patterns of abuse that have existed since the inception of modern policing. There have been many calls for police reform, a process that in many countries has taken the form of increased police engagement with communities. Blair et al . report the results of a large-scale experiment testing the effectiveness of this approach across six countries in the Southern Hemisphere (see the Perspective by Tobon). They found that such community engagement did not increase trust in the police and it did not reduce crime. Improving relationships between police and community may require deeper structural changes before or in addition to approaches such as community policing. —SNV

This article introduces a dataset on the covert use of social media to influence politics by promoting propaganda, advocating controversial viewpoints, and spreading disinformation. Influence efforts (IEs) are defined as: (i) coordinated campaigns by a state, or the ruling party in an autocracy, to impact one or more specific aspects of politics at home or in another state, (ii) through media channels, including social media, by (iii) producing content designed to appear indigenous to the target state. Our data draw on more than 1,000 media reports and 500 research articles/reports to identify IEs, track their progress, and classify their features. The data cover 78 foreign influence efforts (FIEs) and 25 domestic influence efforts (DIEs) – in which governments targeted their own citizens – against 51 different countries from 2011 through early 2021. The Influence Effort dataset measures covert information campaigns by state actors, facilitating research on contemporary statecraft.