CERGIC
Center for Economic Research on Governance, Inequality and Conflict.

Minimum wages are found to have an inconclusive impact on poverty. Using China's individual-level panel dataset combined with county-level minimum wages, our paper shows that minimum wages have a moderate yet sustained effect on poverty reduction. The results show a two-sided effect: higher minimum wages help pull some workers out of poverty, while simultaneously pushing others in. This dynamic of larger "pulling" effects being counterbalanced by smaller "pushing" effects explains why existing studies often find that minimum wages have a negligible or minimal impact on poverty reduction. Notably, the poverty reduction effect is most pronounced for female workers.

Public speeches by leaders can serve as a cost-effective tool for fostering peace, yet their effectiveness remains uncertain, particularly in divided societies experiencing violent conflict. This paper examines the impact of the Catholic Pope's peace-promoting speeches on conflict dynamics in Africa. To investigate this, we construct a novel dataset covering all papal speeches explicitly addressing violent conflict events in Africa between 1997 and 2022. Using event-study methods, we find that papal speeches reduce overall conflict by 23% on average. However, these effects vary significantly depending on the Pope delivering the speech. While Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis's speeches are associated with substantial reductions in conflict, Pope Benedict XVI's speeches show no significant overall effect but are linked to increased battles and religious violence. We further explore four mechanisms driving these heterogeneous effects. First, the impact of papal speeches is significantly stronger in areas with a Catholic presence, where violence drops by up to 69%. Second, the effectiveness of a speech depends on the bishops' ideological alignment with the Pope's vision, with speeches delivered by a Pope who appointed the current bishop being 17% more effective. Third, political leaders play a crucial role in amplifying the Pope's message, as violence significantly declines in birth regions of national leaders. Finally, the response of armed groups varies depending on their religious affiliation and prior history of violence.

Can social media help promote female access to political positions? Using data from 8,814 parliamentary races across 17 sub-Saharan African countries, we explore this question in a context of significant political underrepresentation of women and rising Facebook penetration over the past decade. We leverage the staggered introduction of Facebook's Free Basics-i.e., free access to Facebook through partner mobile operators-across constituencies and time, documenting the success of this connectivity shock and its subsequent effect on female political representation. We find that the availability of Facebook's Free Basics significantly increases the election of female candidates, but only after one electoral cycle. This effect is driven by female candidates endorsed by established political parties and running for the first time. Uncovering the underlying mechanisms, we document a large, positive relationship between social media use and egalitarian gender norms, particularly regarding women in politics. Examining users' online network structures, we show that this association is driven by exposure to diverse and progressive content, and that such online connections are key to Free Basics' electoral impact. Finally, we find that Free Basics' effect is contingent on the presence of fair elections but is amplified where traditional press freedom is limited.

Children's adult outcomes are influenced by both their parents' socioeconomic status (SES) and the SES of the neighborhood where they grew up. We explicitly distinguish between these factors to identify long-run neighborhood effects. We estimate an ordered probit model of neighborhood choice and use it to infer how population shares of parental SES in each neighborhood vary along both observed and unobserved dimensions. We then regress the average observed outcomes in neighborhoods on these population shares to identify potential outcomes. Using racebased neighborhood sorting as an instrument, we estimate that about half of recent racial inequality in intergenerational mobility is explained by residential segregation.

Black males who witnessed a shooting before turning 12 have 31 percent lower household earnings as adults and are 18 percentage points more likely to engage in violence at age 15. These gaps change little after adjusting for observables, and we present extensive evidence that violent behavior is not driven by selection on unobservables. Since effects are not mediated by incarceration or proxies for gang activity or broader neighborhood effects, we focus on toxic stress as the primary causal mechanism. Providing adolescents with nurturing relationships is almost as beneficial as preventing their exposure to violence and there are complementarities when improving both treatments simultaneously.

We examine the political costs of taxation in early modern France. We focus on efforts to enforce the salt tax, the rate of which varied across regions. Using a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design, we compare municipalities just inside the high-tax region with those just outside, before and after a reform aimed at curbing illicit salt smuggling. We find that tax enforcement led to a twenty-fold increase in conflicts between taxpayers and the state in municipalities in the high-tax region. This effect persists until the French Revolution, supporting the view that enforcing the salt tax incurred significant political costs. Finally, we document that the likelihood of conflict increases with tax differences between neighboring regions, which we use to derive an upper bound on the political costs of increased tax enforcement in this historical period.

Performance indicators transform political press coverage, yet their effects on MPs' behavior remain unstudied. Using Nosdeputes.fr, the French website computing such indicators, we address this gap. We compile a comprehensive dataset of press articles, identifying all mentions of MPs' indicators, to disentangle the effects of the website from those of indicator coverage. Performances increase following the website's launch, further amplified by coverage. However, MPs explicitly mentioned do not show additional improvements. While transparency prompts some manipulatione.g., increased copy-pasting-there is no evidence of strategic inflation in amendments or speeches. Thus, indicators enhance collective but not individual accountability, with limited adverse effects.

This chapter examines the evolution of working conditions in pre-industrial Normandy, focusing on the longstanding debates over working time and public holidays. During the Middle Ages. theologians like Nicolas de Clamanges criticised the rising number of non-working religious days, arguing that they promoted non-religious behaviour and harmed poor workers. This debate persisted in the following centuries, particularly between Catholic and Protestant intellectuals. More recently, seminal works in economic history have emphasised the significance of working days for our understanding of past living standards, prompting further methodological refinements. Using new data on religious holidays and payment records, we assess the actual versus theoretical working days in Normandy from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Our analysis suggests that the common assumption that 250 working days per year was the norm for many labourers during the late Middle Ages. This figure seems, however, higher for the later period. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for individuals to work as many as 290-300 days per year. We further explore changes in labour regulations to document daily working conditions, showing that working hours increased by one to two hours per day between the Middle Age and the late eighteenth century. While we focus on Normandy, an important commercial and industrial centre in France, we believe this study offers valuable insights into the economic history of early modern Europe.

We develop a novel approach for estimating the economic costs of conflict, using the production network as the primary mechanism through which the disruptive effects of localized conflict spread to peaceful areas. Applying this approach to the Maoist insurgency in Eastern India from 2000 to 2009, we quantify the overall impact of conflict, taking network propagation into account. Our key finding reveals that a one percentage point increase in conflict-induced distortion is associated with an average annual decrease of 0.236% in aggregate output. Notably, 73% of the total output loss can be attributed to network propagation.