Economic Fallout of Social Conflict: Evidence from Social Media and Satellite Images

In this paper, we leverage a quasi-experimental design and innovative sources of information to examine the impact of rising social conflict and political instability in Haiti. By exploiting this geographical heterogeneity and leveraging data from Facebook and satellite imagery, we show the impact of different types of violence on economic activity in the context of countries with limited data availability. We find that 1 more political event or civil event in an arrondissement, is associated with a decrease by approximately 2% in economic activity in the following 5 months-time window. Importantly, the Facebook data also allows for a disaggregation of the effects by sector, with the most impacted sectors by rising insecurity being home services, business & utility services, and professional services.