Darin Christensen

TL;DR: The authors found that vulnerable governments restrict foreign support to civil society when they feel vulnerable to domestic challenges, and that worries about international retaliation can restrain such behavior if governments believe that clamping down will cost them more than it is worth.

TL;DR: It is shown that mining has contrasting effects on social and armed conflict: while the probability of protests or riots increases after mining starts, there is no increase in rebel activity, and it is showed that the likelihood of social conflict rises with plausibly exogenous increases in world commodity prices.

TL;DR: The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 46 natural experiments that use difference-in-difference designs to estimate the causal effect of commodity price changes on armed civil conflict and found that price increases for labor-intensive agricultural commodities reduce conflict, while increases in the price of oil, a capital intensive commodity, provoke conflict.

TL;DR: This work proposes two mechanisms through which cell phones affect protests: by enabling communication among would-be protesters, cell phones lower coordination costs; and these technologies broadcast information about whether a protest is repressed, further lowering the cost of protesting.

TL;DR: The results suggest that accountability interventions not only have the power to improve health systems during normal times, but also can make health systems resilient to crises that may emerge over the longer run.