Re-examining Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict
نویسنده
چکیده
Previous work by Miguel, Satyanath, and Sergenti (2004), henceforth MSS, addressed the question of whether poor economic performance has a causal effect on civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Using year-to-year rainfall variation as an instrumental variable for economic growth, MSS (2004) find that economic growth is strongly, negatively related to civil conflict: a negative growth shock of 5 percentage points increases the likelihood of civil conflict in the next year by nearly one half. The paper “Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: A Comment” by Ciccone (2011) has the goal of showing that, thanks to the mean-reverting nature of rainfall, MSS (2004) should have used levels of rainfall rather than year-to-year changes in their regression specifications. Ciccone’s main claim is that the use of levels in place of year-to-year changes leads to a different understanding of the effects of economic shocks on civil conflict. As should be clear from the above summary, Ciccone (2011) is not a replication critique, but rather a critique of the regression functional form that we use, namely, the use of rainfall growth rather than rainfall levels as instruments. We have had the complete replication dataset and STATA do files on our websites since 2004, and scores of scholars have replicated our results. Ciccone (2011) replicates our results, as he shows in his tables, and the main results of MSS (2004) remain unchanged. In this note, we respond primarily to the question of whether our understanding of the relationship of economic shocks and conflict is altered by Ciccone’s critique of our
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