Scope: The study will test a causal hypothesis linking solar activity (sunspot emergence, intensity, and duration) to measurable indicators of social tension and population-level harm in developing countries. The analysis will focus on country-month (or country-quarter) panels over a long horizon to capture multiple solar cycles. Outcomes will include protest incidence, conflict events, displacement, mortality…Read more
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Scope: The study will test a causal hypothesis linking solar activity (sunspot emergence, intensity, and duration) to measurable indicators of social tension and population-level harm in developing countries. The analysis will focus on country-month (or country-quarter) panels over a long horizon to capture multiple solar cycles. Outcomes will include protest incidence, conflict events, displacement, mortality proxies, and welfare stress indicators where available. Constraints: Establishing causality is difficult because solar activity may correlate with other geophysical and climatic variables, while social tensions are strongly influenced by governance quality, inflation, unemployment, commodity shocks, conflict spillovers, and historical fragility. Data quality is likely uneven across countries and years, with potential reporting bias in conflict and protest datasets. The design must therefore prioritize robustness checks, alternative operationalizations, lag structures, and sensitivity analyses to omitted-variable bias. Success criteria: The project succeeds if it provides transparent identification logic, stable estimates across specifications, and clear interpretation of effect sizes and uncertainty. A second success criterion is practical relevance: whether any detected effect improves out-of-sample risk prediction beyond standard socioeconomic and political baselines. If no robust causal signal is found, that null result is still a valid and valuable outcome. Deliverables: (1) a curated, versioned merged panel dataset, (2) a reproducible analysis pipeline with documented assumptions, (3) a paper-style report with causal estimates and robustness diagnostics, and (4) a concise policy note clarifying what can and cannot be inferred for early warning systems.