While climate-driven water scarcity is widely linked to conflict, the social consequences of demand-side pressures — rising extraction that depletes shared water resources — are far less understood. This paper examines how upstream water extraction affects downstream water availability and social conflict in Chile, a country that has undergone a massive expansion of water rights over recent decades driven largely by agricultural and mining industries. I combine geo-referenced surface and groundwater rights data for over 50,000 right-holders with yearly data on streamflows, legal water disputes, and protest events. Using a spatial spillover design that exploits river flow direction, I measure upstream extraction pressure as the ratio of rights allocated upstream to estimated baseline river flow. A 10% increase in this ratio reduces annual streamflow by 5.2% (0.44 m³/s) and summer streamflow by 5.7%. On the conflict side, the main contribution of the paper lies in the heterogeneity of social responses. Upstream pressure raises water theft lawsuits by 14% on average — but the protest response is sharply heterogeneous: effects concentrate in overallocated basins where rights already exceed available water; in basins where upstream rights are concentrated in few, visible holders who become focal targets of public grievance; under severe drought, when attribution of scarcity to upstream extractors is most salient; and in mining-dominated areas, where communities lack formal legal recourse and mobilize publicly rather than through courts. Where water is not yet overcommitted, the same pressure is associated with fewer street protests.

Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and subsistence agriculture. We assemble evidence from over 30,000 respondents in 16 original household surveys from nine countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone), Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines), and Latin America (Colombia). We document declines in employment and income in all settings beginning March 2020. The share of households experiencing an income drop ranges from 8 to 87% (median, 68%). Household coping strategies and government assistance were insufficient to sustain pre-crisis living standards, resulting in widespread food insecurity and dire economic conditions even 3 months into the crisis. We discuss promising policy responses and speculate about the risk of persistent adverse effects, especially among children and other vulnerable groups.

We study the effects of a large unconditional cash transfer program on social preferences of children in rural Kenya using a randomized controlled trial. We measure the social preferences of 4,022 children with survey questions and incentivized behavioral games three years after the cash transfer. First, we find no persistent economic effects of the program. Additionally, we find no consistent evidence that children from the treatment group or that children from the spillover group are more or less prosocial than children from the control group. However, we find some evidence of reduced psychological well-being among adults and children in spillover households.

This paper examines how flooding events influence climate policy action, exploring the role of political regimes and electoral accountability in shaping these reactions. In a dynamic event-study setting, I analyze climate policy responses to severe flooding events in 172 countries and all U.S. states. Results show that a severe flood increases the likelihood of enacting national adaptation policies in democratic countries by 27 percentage points and do not significantly impact national mitigation policies. Bundled policies, which integrate adaptation and mitigation, show a moderate positive response in democracies. In non-democratic countries, severe floods have negligible or even negative effects on the enactment of climate policy. The U.S. state-level analysis reveals a rise in disaster-specific legislation following floods, with stronger effects in swing states. This study underscores the distinct dynamics of adaptation versus mitigation policies and the influence of institutions and electoral accountability when it comes to policy responses to climate shocks.

Three million people participated in the Women’s March against discrimination in January 2017, the largest single-day protest in the history of the United States. The inaugural event sparked a grassroots political movement with the goal of increasing the representation of women and other marginalized groups in the political sphere. We show that protesters in the 2017 march increased political preferences for women and people from ethnic minorities in the 2018 House of Representatives Election. Using machine-chosen daily weather shocks as exogenous drivers of attendance at the 2017 march, we find that protesters increased turnout at the House Election and the vote shares obtained by marginalized groups, particularly women, irrespective of their party affiliation. We conclude that protests can help to empower historically underrepresented groups through changes in local political preferences.