In this study, I investigate how conflict victimization influences civilians’ likelihood of (dis)obeying armed actors, a behavioral tendency which I elicit through a lab-in-the field experiment. Violence could foster either obedience or defiance depending on whether a “fear of punishment” or a “taste for retribution” dominate. In a sample with residents in Meta, a conflict-ridden department of Colombia, I find that conflict victimization increases disobedience. Participants who were victimized during the conflict are significantly more likely than non-victimized civilians to disobey the main insurgent group, but no more likely to disobey the Colombian Armed Forces. This differential effect is attributed to more frequent civilian victimization by the insurgents. I support a causal interpretation through an Instrumental Variable approach which leverages the distance to a historic front line as an instrument for victimization. In sum, the findings show that violent targeting of civilians can inspire resistance rather than submission.

The relationship between market participation and moral values has been an object of a long-lasting debate in economics. Yet, to date little credible empirical evidence exists. In this study, we examine the relationship between market participation and moral decision-making by conducting rule-breaking experiments in 13 villages across Greenland (N=543), where stark contrasts in market participation within villages allow us to hold village-level factors constant. First, we document a robust positive association between market participation and moral behavior towards anonymous others. Second, we find that market-integrated participants display universalism in moral decision-making, whereas subsistence economy participants make more honest decisions toward co-villagers. A battery of robustness tests confirm that the behavioral differences between market and subsistence economy participants are not driven by variation in socioeconomic characteristics, childhood background, cultural identities, kinship structure, global connectedness, or exposure to religious and political institutions.

The ability of states to exercise authority often varies considerably within their borders. Yet, the empirical literature on state capacity has typically relied on country-level indicators of state capacity. In this paper, we develop a measure of local state capacity for all five-kilometer grid cells across Sub-Saharan Africa. The measure builds on geocoded survey data on local state presence, which we predict and extrapolate through a machine learning model using readily available data on the costs and benefits of capacity building across space. We showcase the usefulness of measuring state capacity at a local level by employing the index as a moderating factor in the relationship between oil wealth and violent conflict and show that areas with higher levels of state capacity face lower risks of conflict outbreak due to exogenous oil wealth shocks.

Trusting behaviour is a cornerstone of cooperation and, hence, economic performance, not least in poorer communities where economic transactions often rely on informal agreements. But trusting behaviour is potentially costly since the counterpart may decide to defect. In this study, we investigate whether food scarcity influences the level of trusting behaviour in rural Tanzania by leveraging quasi-experimental variation in food supply induced by the harvest. Through a lab-in-the-field experiment, we document that farmers display lower levels of trusting behaviour during the lean season compared to the abundant season and show that the difference is explained by variation in food scarcity.

This paper investigates how economic expectations shape voting intentions in a hypothetical independence referendum in Greenland, a self-governing region of the Kingdom of Denmark. I identify the causal effect of economic expectations by randomly exposing respondents to a prime informing on Greenland’s current fiscal deficit. Respondents exposed to the information are 43% more likely to oppose independence, an effect I attribute to (a) worsened economic expectations and (b) greater political participation among pessimistic respondents. I further document that the impact of the prime depends on respondents' personal ties to the political union. While information exposure substantially increases opposition to independence among voters with strong ties to Denmark, voting intentions are essentially unchanged for respondents with weak ties to Denmark. Still, instrumental motives shape preferences for a sufficiently large proportion of voters for the information prime to alter the outcome of the independence referendum.

Cooperation is essential to reap efficiency gains from specialization, not least in poor communities where economic transactions are often informal. Yet, cooperation might be more difficult to sustain under scarcity, since defecting from a cooperative equilibrium can yield safe, short-run benefits. In this study, we investigate how scarcity affects cooperation by leveraging exogenous variation in economic conditions induced by the Msimu harvest in rural Tanzania. We document significant changes in food consumption between the pre- and post-harvest period, and show that lean season scarcity reduces socially efficient but personally risky investment in a framed investment game. This can contribute to what is commonly referred to as a behavioral poverty trap.