This paper explores the macroeconomic impact of social unrest, using a novel index based on news reports. The findings are threefold. First, unrest has an adverse effect economic activity, with GDP remaining average 0.2 percentage points below pre-shock baseline six quarters after one-standard deviation increase in index. is driven by sharp contractions manufacturing and services (sectoral dime...

Students of popular contention have long observed that social unrest mimics the forces of nature, spreading rapidly across time and space, likening it to a “prairie-fire” or observing a “snowball effect” of strikes and work stoppages. Yet little is known or understood either about how unrest spreads across space over time, or regional susceptibility to unrest. In the attempt to test whether suc...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of social media in communication discourse in the Islamic Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. Design/methodology/approach – By applying the theory of social networks and a method known as critical discourse analysis (CDA) this study investigates the role of social media in the recent waves of popular unrest in the MENA r...

Social unrest is endemic in many societies, and recent news has drawn attention to happenings in Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Civilian populations mobilize, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes in an organized manner, to raise awareness of key issues or to demand changes in governing or other organizational structures. It is of key interest to social scientists and polic...

We present a new index of social unrest based on counts relevant media reports, covering 130 countries monthly starting in 1986. Spikes the identify major events, which match event timelines from external sources for four regional waves unrest. assess our against others and show it performs as well next best alternative but with superior coverage. Social is associated 3 percentage point increas...

The Political Economy of Social Exclusion with Implications for Immigration Policy Minorities, such as ethnic and immigration groups, have often been subject to exclusion through labor market discrimination, residential and employment segregation policies, business ownership regulations, restrictions on political participation, access to public services and more. This paper studies the dynamics...

Social unrest often erupts suddenly and diffuses quickly. What drives people to overcome their collective action problem and join a riot or protest, turning what is initially a small event into a widespread movement? We address this question by examining the Swing riots of 1830-31. The communication constraints of the time induced spatio-temporal variation in exposure to news about the uprising...

Can credit affect social stability? To answer this question, we turn to a natural experiment from 1930s China, where credit contracted as a consequence of the 1933 U.S. Silver Purchase program. Building on extensive archival information, we assemble a novel, hand-collected data set of loan contracts to individual firms as well as labor unrest episodes. We show that the Silver Purchase shock res...

Event detection in online social media has primarily focused on identifying abnormal spikes, or bursts, in activity. However, disruptive events such as socio-economic disasters, civil unrest, and even power outages, often involve abnormal troughs or lack of activity, leading to absenteeism. We present the first study, to our knowledge, that models absenteeism and uses detected absenteeism insta...