Score contribution per author:
α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count
I use a novel monthly panel of provincially-collected central government revenues and conflict fatalities to estimate government revenues lost due to conflict in Afghanistan since 2005. Headline estimates are large, implying total revenue losses of $3bn since 2005 and that gains from peace would have been about 6 percent of GDP per year. That this is larger than estimates in cross-country studies reflects the uncommon intensity of the conflict in Afghanistan. The key challenge to identification is omitted variable bias, which I address by extending Powell’s (2021) generalized synthetic control method to a dynamic setting. This allows estimation of impulse response functions robust to a broad class of omitted variables bias.