Maritime piracy is a growing scourge on the international community-imposing large costs on maritime states and industries, as well as potentially undermining state capacity and funding terrorism. Using original data on over three thousand pirate attacks, we argue that these attacks are, in part, a response to poor labor market opportunities. To establish this, we take advantage of the strong effect of commodity prices on labor market opportunities in piracy-prone states. Consistent with our

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... ory, we show that changes in the price of labor and capital-intensive commodities have consistent and strong effects on the number of pirate attacks in a country's territorial waters each month. We confirm these results by instrumenting for commodity prices using monthly precipitation levels. While conjuring images of cannons and tattered sails, piracy is also a modern scourge-and an increasingly costly as well as common one. Besides the costs of theft, sabotage and ransoms from hijackings, piracy delays shipping, drives up security costs, hinders development in coastal states and is a potential source of funding for terrorist groups, insurgents and international criminal organizations (Luft and Korin 2004; Murphy 2007; Lehr 2006). Furthermore, the number of pirate attacks (worldwide) reported by the United Nations' maritime branch-the International Maritime Organization (IMO)-has increased