Landmine clearance restores the productive value of contaminated land, promising economic development. However, clearance also sparks competition over the land where war has left ownership claims unclear. What happens to the land once it is demined, and who captures the benefits? We address this question in Cambodia, historically one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world, using a staggered difference-in- differences design on a commune panel from 1992 to 2014. Clearance raises the probability that a commune contains a large-scale land concession to more than five times its pre-clearance level, assigning the land to private companies. At the same time, local development gains as measured by nightlights are small. These averages hide two divergent outcomes, separated by how well local claims to the land were recorded by the time of clearance. Where records are widespread, cleared communes light up by 4.7 percentage points and household consumption rises by roughly a third. Where they are rare, land concessions and disputes rise, while development and household consumption gains are close to zero. Post-conflict reconstruction that recovers land but not the records of who holds it risks dispossessing the communities who depend on it.
Wealthy foreign real estate buyers have increased rapidly over the past few decades. Of particular note are those from China; in 2016 alone, Chinese buyers were the source of over 100 billion USD of outflows to real estate markets worldwide. In this paper, we investigate the effect that these wealthy Chinese buyers have on local U.S. housing markets, local governments and residents. Using a novel instrument, we demonstrate that an increase in the share of wealthy Chinese buyers in a locality causes an increase in house price growth. As a result of this increased growth, local governments benefit from increased property tax revenues but do not see a drop in sales tax revenues, suggesting that the vacancy rate for Chinese-owned properties is no different from that of counterfactual buyers. A drop in rental prices suggests that wealthy Chinese buyers are more likely to rent out their houses and less likely to move into them.
This paper provides evidence of the long-run effects of a permanent increase in agricultural productivity on conflict. We construct a newly digitized and geo-referenced dataset of battles in Europe, the Near East, and North Africa from 1400–1900 CE and examine variation in agricultural productivity due to the introduction of potatoes from the Americas to the Old World after the Columbian Exchange. We find that the introduction of potatoes led to a sizeable and permanent reduction in conflict. *Media coverage: marginalrevolution.com* [[pdf]](https://www.jorismueller.com/files/Agricultural_productivity_conflict_latest_draft.pdf/)