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Among a set of extractive institutions particularly set up by colonial powers themselves, military conscription has been understudied to this day. In this paper, I attempt to delve deeper into this important historical institution in French West Africa (FWA) during the interwar era (1920-1939). First of all, I find that when the conscription target stipulated by higher colonial officials increased, strikingly the lower district-level authorities were not complying with this figure faithfully, even when they complied, the target increase was only met by a dubious increase in "deemed fit" soldiers in regions where labor constraints were already running high. Such findings point to a more complex French colonial rule in West Africa where authorities were "fighting over" the scarce resource of labor. Secondly, I find that in times of negative income shocks, potential flooding events in tropical regions of FWA made individuals more likely to volunteering into the army and correspondingly, an increase in drought risk in arid Sahel regions of FWA also made the indigenous more likely to present themselves to the military. Both effects point to the fact that the conscription system was being exploited as an informal insurance device by the locals at a time when insurance institutions were lacking and weather-induced negative agricultural income shocks were frequent.

We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 "minaret ban" referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator's nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%).

We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 "minaret ban" referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator's nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%).

Among a set of extractive institutions particularly set up by colonial powers themselves, military conscription has been understudied to this day. In this paper, I attempt to delve deeper into this important historical institution in French West Africa (FWA) during the interwar era (1920-1939). First of all, I find that when the conscription target stipulated by higher colonial officials increased, strikingly the lower district-level authorities were not complying with this figure faithfully, even when they complied, the target increase was only met by a dubious increase in "deemed fit" soldiers in regions where labor constraints were already running high. Such findings point to a more complex French colonial rule in West Africa where authorities were "fighting over" the scarce resource of labor. Secondly, I find that in times of negative income shocks, potential flooding events in tropical regions of FWA made individuals more likely to volunteering into the army and correspondingly, an increase in drought risk in arid Sahel regions of FWA also made the indigenous more likely to present themselves to the military. Both effects point to the fact that the conscription system was being exploited as an informal insurance device by the locals at a time when insurance institutions were lacking and weather-induced negative agricultural income shocks were frequent.

Among a set of extractive institutions particularly set up by colonial powers themselves, military conscription has been understudied to this day. In this paper, I attempt to delve deeper into this important historical institution in French West Africa (FWA) during the interwar era (1920-1939). First of all, I find that when the conscription target stipulated by higher colonial officials increased, strikingly the lower district-level authorities were not complying with this figure faithfully, even when they complied, the target increase was only met by a dubious increase in "deemed fit" soldiers in regions where labor constraints were already running high. Such findings point to a more complex French colonial rule in West Africa where authorities were "fighting over" the scarce resource of labor. Secondly, I find that in times of negative income shocks, potential flooding events in tropical regions of FWA made individuals more likely to volunteering into the army and correspondingly, an increase in drought risk in arid Sahel regions of FWA also made the indigenous more likely to present themselves to the military. Both effects point to the fact that the conscription system was being exploited as an informal insurance device by the locals at a time when insurance institutions were lacking and weather-induced negative agricultural income shocks were frequent.

We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 "minaret ban" referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator's nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%).

We study how news coverage of immigrant criminality impacted municipality-level votes in the November 2009 "minaret ban" referendum in Switzerland. The campaign, successfully led by the populist Swiss People's Party, played aggressively on fears of Muslim immigration and linked Islam with terrorism and violence. We combine an exhaustive violent crime detection dataset with detailed information on crime coverage from 12 newspapers. The data allow us to quantify the extent of pre-vote media bias in the coverage of migrant criminality. We then estimate a theory-based voting equation in the cross-section of municipalities. Exploiting random variations in crime occurrences, we find a first-order, positive effect of news coverage on political support for the minaret ban. Counterfactual simulations show that, under a law forbidding newspapers to disclose a perpetrator's nationality, the vote in favor of the ban would have decreased by 5 percentage points (from 57.6% to 52.6%).

Among a set of extractive institutions particularly set up by colonial powers themselves, military conscription has been understudied to this day. In this paper, I attempt to delve deeper into this important historical institution in French West Africa (FWA) during the interwar era (1920-1939). First of all, I find that when the conscription target stipulated by higher colonial officials increased, strikingly the lower district-level authorities were not complying with this figure faithfully, even when they complied, the target increase was only met by a dubious increase in "deemed fit" soldiers in regions where labor constraints were already running high. Such findings point to a more complex French colonial rule in West Africa where authorities were "fighting over" the scarce resource of labor. Secondly, I find that in times of negative income shocks, potential flooding events in tropical regions of FWA made individuals more likely to volunteering into the army and correspondingly, an increase in drought risk in arid Sahel regions of FWA also made the indigenous more likely to present themselves to the military. Both effects point to the fact that the conscription system was being exploited as an informal insurance device by the locals at a time when insurance institutions were lacking and weather-induced negative agricultural income shocks were frequent.

Using a sample of banks operating in 24 countries, we provide robust evidence that stronger creditor rights are associated with higher capital adequacy ratios of conventional banks but not of Islamic banks. Such results are more effective on bank core capital, suggesting that bank managers tend to increase pure equity to signal better monitoring efforts and avoid losing control in an environment characterized by strong creditor protection. Except in less religious countries with less competitive markets, Islamic banks appear to be less affected by creditor protection possibly because of the profit loss sharing (PLS) principle that considers depositors as investors who agree to share profits and losses with the bank, thus making the effect of creditor protection weaker or irrelevant in an Islamic banking context. JEL classification: G21, G28, G32, K22