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Economics

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Hybrid U-Net: Semantic Segmentation Of High-Resolution Satellite Images To Detect War Destruction, Shima Nabiee, Matthew Harding, Jonathan Hersh, Nader Bagherzadeh Jul 2022

Hybrid U-Net: Semantic Segmentation Of High-Resolution Satellite Images To Detect War Destruction, Shima Nabiee, Matthew Harding, Jonathan Hersh, Nader Bagherzadeh

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Destruction caused by violent conflicts play a big role in understanding the dynamics and consequences of conflicts, which is now the focus of a large body of ongoing literature in economics and political science. However, existing data on conflict largely come from news or eyewitness reports, which makes it incomplete, potentially unreliable, and biased for ongoing conflicts. Using satellite images and deep learning techniques, we can automatically extract objective information on violent events. To automate this process, we created a dataset of high-resolution satellite images of Syria and manually annotated the destroyed areas pixel-wise. Then, we used this dataset to …


A Network Of Thrones: Kinship And Conflict In Europe, 1495–1918, Seth G. Benzell, Kevin Cooke Jul 2021

A Network Of Thrones: Kinship And Conflict In Europe, 1495–1918, Seth G. Benzell, Kevin Cooke

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We construct a database linking European royal kinship networks, monarchies, and wars to study the effect of family ties on conflict. To establish causality, we exploit decreases in connection caused by apolitical deaths of rulers' mutual relatives. These deaths are associated with substantial increases in the frequency and duration of war. We provide evidence that these deaths affect conflict only through changing the kinship network. Over our period of interest, the percentage of European monarchs with kinship ties increased threefold. Together, these findings help explain the well-documented decrease in European war frequency.