THE HARD PROBLEM OF PREDICTION FOR CONFLICT PREVENTION
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Journal Title
Journal of the European Economic Association
ISSN
1542-4766
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Type
Article
This Version
AM
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Mueller, H., & Rauh, C. THE HARD PROBLEM OF PREDICTION FOR CONFLICT PREVENTION. Journal of the European Economic Association https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.82615
Abstract
In this article we propose a framework to tackle conflict prevention, an issue which has received interest in several policy areas. A key challenge of conflict forecasting for prevention is that outbreaks of conflict in previously peaceful countries are rare events and therefore hard to predict. To make progress in this hard problem, this project summarizes more than four million newspaper articles using a topic model. The topics are then fed into a random forest to predict conflict risk, which is then integrated into a simple static framework in which a decision maker decides on the optimal number of interventions to minimize the total cost of conflict and intervention. According to the stylized model, cost savings compared to not intervening pre-conflict are over US$1 trillion even with relatively ineffective interventions, and US$13 trillion with effective interventions.
Sponsorship
Banco de España, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (CEX2019-000915-S) and the Ayudas Fundación BBVA
Embargo Lift Date
2025-03-18
Identifiers
This record's DOI: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.82615
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/335185
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