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.
Why do firms publicly echo government language? Two common explanations are noise, under which alignment is payoff-irrelevant, and government consumption, under which the regime rewards aligned firms because it directly values alignment. We propose a third explanation: the regime can use alignment to screen firms for costly political support. We develop a contracting framework encompassing all three explanations and derive two results. First, absent screening, alignment cannot predict differences in firms’ mean payoff responses or costly actions when political stress materializes. Second, under optimal screening, lower-cost firms align, provide greater support, and receive more favorable treatment. We test these predictions using a transparent measure constructed from listed Chinese firms’ use of regime-specific phrases in annual reports. More-aligned firms experience larger valuation losses after an adverse political shock and provide costly support by retaining more workers during local labor unrest. Within our framework, these responses rule in a screening role and are consistent with optimal screening. [[pdf]](https://www.jorismueller.com/files/public_displays.pdf/)
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/)