Abstract. This paper offers a historical micro-level analysis of the impact of climatic shocks on the incidence of conflict in colonial Nigeria (1912Nigeria ( -1945. Primary historical sources on court cases, prisoners and homicides are used to construct an index of socio-political conflict using principal component analysis and measure climatic shocks through deviations from long-term rainfall patterns in a nonlinear (U-shaped) relation, capturing both drought and excessive rainfall. We find a robust and significant relationship between rainfall deviations and conflict intensity, which tends to be stronger in agroecological zones that are least resilient to climatic variability (such as Guinean savannah) and where (pre-) colonial political structures were less centralized. We find tentative evidence that the relationship is weaker in areas that specialize in the production of export crops (such as cocoa and palm oil) compared to subsistence farming areas, suggesting that agricultural diversification acts as an insurance mechanism against the whims of nature. Additional historical information on food shortages, crop-price spikes and outbreaks of violence is used to explore the climate-conflict connection in greater detail.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on the links between political regimes and economic development by studying the effects of years in office on economic development. The hypothesis is that dictators who stay in office for a long time period will find it increasingly difficult to carry out sound economic policies. We argue that such economic policies are the result of information asymmetries inherent to dictatorships (known as the ‘dictator dilemma’) and of changes in the personality of dictators (known as the ‘winner effect’). We call the combination of these two terms the ‘dictator effect’. We present evidence to suggest that long years in office impacts on economic growth (which is reduced), inflation (which increases) and the quality of institutions (which deteriorates). The negative effect of long years of tenure (i.e. the ‘dictator effect’) is particularly strong in young states and in Africa and the Near East.

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We empirically investigate the role of natural resources, and governance in explaining variation in the intensity of conflict during the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone. As a proxy for governance quality we exploit exogenous variation in political competition at the level of the chieftaincy. As a proxy for resources we use data on the location of pre-war mining sites. Our main result is that neither governance nor resources robustly explains the onset or duration of violence during the civil war in Sierra Leone.

We are indebted to Erwin Bulte, James Fenske, Ewout Frankema and Ted Miguel whose comments and suggestions substantially improved this study. For useful comments, we thank Gareth Austin,