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This paper explores how commodity price shocks in the international market a¤ect armed con ‡ict. Using a new dataset on civil war in Colombia, we …nd that exogenous price shocks in the co¤ee and oil markets a¤ect con ‡ict in opposite directions, and through separate channels. A sharp fall in co¤ee prices during the late 1990s increased violence disproportionately in co¤ee-intensive municipalities, by lowering wages and the opportunity cost of recruitment into armed groups. In contrast, a rise in oil prices increased con ‡ict in the oil region, by expanding local government budgets and raising potential gains from rapacity and predation on these resources. Our analysis suggests that the price of labor intensive goods a¤ect con ‡ict primarily through the opportunity cost e¤ect, while the price of capital intensive goods a¤ect con ‡ict through the rapacity channel.We are especially grateful to Arin Dube for detailed comments and to

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months.

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Civil wars divide nations along social, economic, and political cleavages, often pitting one neighbor against another. To restore social cohesion, many countries undertake truth and reconciliation efforts. We examined the consequences of one such effort in Sierra Leone, designed and implemented by a Sierra Leonean nongovernmental organization called Fambul Tok. As a part of this effort, community-level forums are set up in which victims detail war atrocities, and perpetrators confess to war crimes. We used random assignment to study its impact across 200 villages, drawing on data from 2383 individuals. We found that reconciliation had both positive and negative consequences. It led to greater forgiveness of perpetrators and strengthened social capital: Social networks were larger, and people contributed more to public goods in treated villages. However, these benefits came at a substantial cost: The reconciliation treatment also worsened psychological health, increasing depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder in these same villages. For a subset of villages, we measured outcomes both 9 months and 31 months after the intervention. These results show that the effects, both positive and negative, persisted into the longer time horizon. Our findings suggest that policy-makers need to restructure reconciliation processes in ways that reduce their negative psychological costs while retaining their positive societal benefits.