Can transitory agricultural shocks affect long-term violent conflict risk? Using a staggered event study approach and data on conflict events and desert locust swarms across 0.25 degree grid cells in Africa and the Arabian peninsula from 1997-2018, I find that past exposure to a locust swarm increases the average annual probability of violent conflict by 0.8 percentage points (43%). Effects persist for at least 14 years and are driven by swarms arriving in crop-growing cells during the main growing season. This result suggests a decrease in the opportunity cost of fighting in affected areas. In line with this, I find that swarm exposure reduces subsequent cereal yields, indicating a permanent income mechanism for this severe transitory shock. But the feasibility of fighting also matters: increases in local conflict risk are concentrated in years with active fighting groups in neighboring areas, when the reduced opportunity cost of fighting is combined with opportunities to fight. Patterns of long-term impacts are similar for exposure to severe drought, indicating the mechanisms are not specific to locust swarms. Long-term impacts of transitory economic shocks on conflict risk add further motivation for policies mitigating the risk of such shocks and supporting recovery.

COVID-19 school closure policies affected household childcare needs. We use differences in when children in different grades returned to school to estimate the impact of a change in the childcare burden on adults' labor supply using nationally-representative data from Kenya. Having a child return to school increases adults' labor supply, with gains concentrated in household agriculture hours. Impacts are not significantly different by sex of the adult: though women have greater responsibility for childcare in Kenya, both women and men increased childcare hours during school closures. The impact of partial reopening on work hours corresponds to over 30% of the fall in average hours in the first few months after COVID-19 cases were detected in Kenya, indicating that school closures are responsible for a significant share of the reduction in labor supply during the pandemic. The results suggest that policies making childcare more available and affordable could have positive impacts on adult labor supply in Kenya.

Voltage quality issues—such as sags, spikes, and fluctuations—are pervasive across many low- and middle income countries, yet their unobservability has hampered large-scale analysis of their economic importance. We combine minute-by-minute customer-level power measurements with detailed panel surveys of more than 1,500 households and small businesses to characterize voltage quality issues experienced by customers in Accra, Ghana and analyze their costs. First, we document widespread voltage problems: approximately 20% of grid electricity is of poor quality (more than 10% below nominal voltage, 230V), including 30% during peak hours. Second, this imposes costs through spending on voltage protective equipment, dealing with damaged appliances, and not being able to fully utilize appliances. Third, using a differences-in-differences design, we find that a 5V increase in average voltage—resulting from quasi-random construction of new transformers—reduces the frequency of appliance damages at treatment sites relative to control sites, but generates no other economic impacts after 1 year.