Eik Leong Swee

Together or Separate? Post-Conflict Partition, Ethnic Homogenization, and the Provision of Public Schooling

The partitioning of political jurisdictions is becoming an increasingly common component of agreements to end ethnic conflict, although its impact on post-conflict recovery remains unclear. This paper studies the effects of the partition which ended the 1992–1995 Bosnian War on the post-war provision of public schooling. I find that partitioned municipalities provide 58% more primary schools and 37% more teachers (per capita). Driven mainly by convergent preferences for ethnically oriented schools, however, this arrangement delivers distributional consequences: in partitioned municipalities, ethnic majority children are more likely to complete primary schooling, while for ethnic minority children it is the opposite.

Is Happiness Really a Warm Gun? The Consequences of US Weapons Sales for Political Violence

We examine the effect of U.S. weapons purchases on political violence in 191 countries during the period 1970-2008. Our identification strategy exploits exogenous shifts in the cost of purchasing U.S. commercial weapons, through a combination of time variation in U.S. inflation and cross-sectional variation in a countrys historical frequency of purchases. We find that weapons purchases reduce the likelihood of political repression but increase the likelihood of onset of civil war in purchasing countries. The results suggest that state investment in military capability incites civil war in countries where state repression of an aggrieved opposition would have otherwise prevailed.

Income Inequality and Conflict Intensification in Mandate Palestine

We examine the effect of inter-ethnic income inequality on conflict intensification in Mandate Palestine, using a novel panel dataset comprising district-level characteristics and conflict intensity across 18 districts during 1926-1945. We instrument Jewish-Arab income inequality by combining annual variation in rainfall with cross-sectional variation in pre-Mandate crop intensity, to extract exogenous variation in inequality between non-agrarian Jews and agrarian Arabs. We find a substantial e ect of inequality on conflict intensification, especially during periods where the relationship between Arabs and Jews were particularly strained. Our estimates are driven by Arab-initiated attacks, reflecting local average treatment effects of Arab farmers who move from agrarian work to violence in response to adverse rainfall shocks, suggesting that economic shocks coupled with existing economic segregation facilitate the transition into violence when opposing groups are economic substitutes. Further investigations reveal that inequality-driven violence was not the result of opportunity costs or appropriation, but rather an expression of resentment.

Migrant Networks and Job Search: Evidence from Thailand

Social networks may be important to internal migrants in developing countries where the extent of information asymmetry is sizeable. This paper identifies network effects among rural-urban migrants in Thailand by exploiting heterogeneous response to rainfall shocks as exogenous variation affecting network size. While networks substantially reduce the duration of job search, in this case they tend to direct migrants towards agricultural (rather than non-agricultural) jobs because the local average treatment effects estimator identifies what happens to employment outcomes when the agricultural part of the network increases.