We study the causal impact of electing criminally accused politicians to state legislative assemblies in India on the subsequent economic performance of their constituencies. Using data on the criminal background of candidates running for state assembly elections and a constituency-level measure of economic activity proxied by intensity of night-time lights, we employ a regression discontinuity design that controls for unobserved heterogeneity across constituencies and find 22-percentage point lower yearly growth in the intensity of night-time lights arising from the election of a criminally accused politician. These effects are driven by serious, financial and the number of criminal charges and appear to be concentrated in the less developed and more corrupt Indian states. Similar findings emerge for the provision of public goods using data on India's major rural roads construction program.

Authors' calculation based on the 2002 Northern Uganda Survey data. The risk deciles group together all of the households in communities with risk betwee 0-0.099, 0.10-0.199, and so forth. *,**,*** Significant at the 1, 5, 10% level, respectively Supplementary Material II: Full Results This files contains the full results for the main results. Below are names and descriptions of all of the variables. Name Description Main variables logit_risk Predicted risk logit_risk2 Predicted risk squared Goats Total number of goats Sheep Total number of sheep Pigs Total number of pigs Cattle Total number of cattle Chicken Total number of chicken Cassava Grew cassava during the last season (January-June 2002) (binary) Sweet pea Grew sweet pea during the last season (January-June 2002) (binary) Groundnut Grew groundnut during the last season (January-June 2002) (binary) Sorghum Grew sorghum during the last season (January-June 2002) (binary) Maize Grew maize during the last season (January-June 2002) (binary) Beans Grew beans during the last season (January-June 2002) (binary) Millet Grew millet during the last season (January-June 2002) (binary) Sesame Grew sesame during the last season (January-June 2002) (binary) control | | -.

Although the effects of insecurity are believed to be important, these have never been directly measured. Previous estimates of the costs of conflict have only captured the joint effect of violence and insecurity. The distinction is important for understanding the origins of the costs and for policy design. Using the spatialtemporal variation in the placement of violence, I create spatially disaggregated measures of insecurity and present the first estimates of the relative causal contributions of the risk and experience of violence. The article also provides the first micro-data based counterpart to the crosscountry literature on the costs of conflict.

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