2) Edward Miguel. Poverty and Witch Killing. Review of Economic Studies (2005) 72, 1153–1172 [Retrieved on 25 Aug 2009] Available at (with a graph of the weather – witch killing correlation)
http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~emiguel/pdfs/miguel_witch.pdfThis paper uses local rainfall variation to identify the impact of income shocks on murder in
a rural Tanzanian district.2 Extreme rainfall—resulting in drought or floods—is exogenous and
is associated with poor harvests and near-famine conditions in the region, and a large increase
in the murder of “witches”: there are twice as many witch murders in years of extreme rainfall
as in other years. The victims are nearly all elderly women, typically killed by relatives. These
econometric results, across 11 years in 67 villages, provide novel evidence on the role of income
shocks in causing violent crime, and religious violence in particular, and also provide insights
into witchcraft—an important social phenomenon in Africa rarely studied by economists.
