The Dispossessed: Large-Scale Land Acquisitions, Elite Capture, and Dissent in Africa (opens in new tab)

Over the past two decades, millions of hectares of land in Africa have been transferred to investors, raising fears of displacement and conflict. This paper estimates the causal impact of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) on local dissent by comparing successfully implemented projects to a control group of exogenously failed deals. Using staggered difference-in-differences estimators across 1,391 geocoded deals, I find that LSLAs cause a sus...