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 2.0 percentage points (71%). Effects are driven by swarms arriving in crop-growing cells during the main growing season. Exposure also reduces agricultural activity and increases out-migration over the long-term. I explore income-related mechanisms with a model of occupational choice. I find null effects on swarms on conflict in the year of exposure and a lag of 7 years before the largest effects, which are not consistent with predictions based on an opportunity cost mechanism alone. Impacts on conflict are driven by periods of local insecurity or famine, which explains the delay in the largest impacts of swarm exposure and are consistent with a grievance mechanism creating variation in the perceived returns to fighting. Patterns of long-term impacts on violent conflict and heterogeneity by local grievances are similar for exposure to severe droughts, indicating the mechanisms are not specific to locust swarms.  These results add further motivation for policies mitigating the risk of agricultural shocks and promoting household resilience and long-term recovery.

This paper identifies the impact of a shock to adolescent school availability---potentially affecting both household childcare burdens and child labor---on adult labor supply in the context of COVID-19-related school closures in Kenya. We compare changes in outcomes after schools partially reopened in October 2020 for households with children in a grade eligible to return against those with children in adjacent grades. Using nationally-representative bi-monthly panel data, we find that an adolescent returning to school increases adults' weekly work by 4.3 hours (27%) in the short run, concentrated among the most flexible margins of adjustment and particularly household agriculture. Contrary to evidence from high-income settings, overall effects are not gendered. We find no effects of the partial reopening on respondent childcare hours and heterogeneity in labor supply effects by household characteristics does not align with predictions based on a childcare mechanism. Instead, the results indicate that increased adult work hours substitute for reduced child work in household agriculture as a child goes back to school. Impacts on labor supply are driven by less wealthy households with children engaged in household agriculture, while wealthier agricultural households substitute child labor with increased hired labor. Our results show that adolescent schooling has important consequences for household production and labor supply decisions. Poor agricultural households face particularly high opportunity costs for children's education.

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.