The impact of rainfall variability on conflict outbreaks at the monthly level

Replication materials for the manuscript `The impact of rainfall variability on conflict outbreaks at the monthly level'.

The materials in this repository allow users to reproduce the statistical analyses appearing in the main text and extended data of the manuscript.

If you find meaningful errors in the code or have questions or suggestions, please contact Thierry Yerema Coulibaly at yerema.coul@gmail.com

Organization of repository

• Analysis/code: folder for scripts for downloading, processing and replication of the data, as well as for the statistical analysis.
• Analysis/Input: folder for data inputs for analysis.
• Analysis/Temporary: folder for data manipulation during the processing of the data.
• Analysis/Output: folder for data after processing
• Analysis/Manuscript: folder for output of regression analyses
• Analysis/Output/regression_file_monthly.dta: Replication of main dataset for analysis at the monthly level.
• Analysis/Output/regression_file_annually.dta: Replication of main dataset for analysis at the annual level.

Notes for replication:

• A note about replication with ACLED and globaldatalab data: Ideally we would like to provide replication materials for the entire pipeline beginning with the raw publicly available data and ending with the results presented in the manuscript. However, due to the ACLED data use agreement and global data lab use agreement, we cannot post their data in an online repository. Our replication data excludes data from these sources.

Instructions

Overview of the main replication materials:

The repository is ~357MB (and >6Gb if you download all the raw data)

• Analysis/regression_file_CHIRPS_precipitation_monthly.dta and Analysis/regression_file_CHIRPS_precipitation_annually.dta is a replication file of the data used in the main analysis. it can be used to check the results of the analysis of the manuscript without downloading and preprocessing the raws data.

• Analysis/Inputs is an empty directory that is filled when running script 01 and 02.

• Scripts:

  Script 01 downloads the CHIRPs rainfall rasters data and handling missing values

  Script 02 downloads the GADM, GDL and UCDP/GED shapefiles data

  Script 03 merges the GADM and GDL shapefiles data

  Script 04 merges the GADM and UCDP/GED shapefiles data

  Script 05 processes the zonal statistics of the rainfall CHRIPS raster data by GADM shapefile

  Script 06 downloads the GNI per capita and the SHDI-SGDI data

  Script 07 imports the UCDP/GED data

  Script 08 processes the monthly rainfall variables for statistical analysis in stata

  Script 09 processes the yearly rainfall variables for statistical analysis in stata

  Script 10 performs the monthly statistical analysis

  Script 11 performs the yearly statistical analysis

R packages required

• sp
• raster
• rgdal
• sf
• terra
• R.utils

Scripts were written with R 3.6.3

python packages required

• arcpy

Scripts were written with python 3.6

Stata packages required

• reghdfe
• kountry
• outreg2
• autorename

Scripts were written with Stata 16.1 for MAC