Economics of Conflict and Violence

My doctoral thesis is divided in four independent papers that study the economic causes and consequences of conflicts and violence. In the first two papers I assess the economic impact of political instability and violence on the local economy. The first chapter focuses on the magnitude and heterogeneity of the costs of violence on the manufacturing sector in a panel of 160 countries between 1989 and 2010. Exploiting within-country-sector differences, I find that conflict affects negatively the economic growth. However, labor-intensive sectors show more resilience as compared to capital-intensive sectors, whose performance is greatly altered by the intensity of a conflict. The second project focuses on a case study of the impact of conflict on firms, India’s Maoist Insurgency. Using firm data at the district-level, I disentangle the channels of transmission of the effects of conflict on firms’ performance. The third project focuses on the economic determinants of domestic violence in Switzerland. Results show a significant impact of both individual characteristics and labor market conditions on domestic violence offenses. In the last project, I study empirically how a policy targeting the cash-funding system of armed groups affects criminal activities, focusing on the 2016 Indian Demonetization. Results suggest that there is a positive and significant impact of the policy on surrenders of Maoist insurgents.