Evidence of a causal effect of inequality on crime is scarce in developing countries. This paper estimates the effect in a unique context: Mexico's Drug War. The analysis exploits a unique dataset containing inequality and crime statistics for more than 2,000 Mexican municipalities over a...

We study how armed conflicts affected educational outcomes in Rwanda during the nineties, relying on two waves of population census data and on a difference-in-differences identification strategy. Our results indicate that the conflicts caused on average a 22% drop in schooling attainments,...

We study from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective how a network of military alliances and enmities affects the intensity of a conflict. The model combines elements from network theory and from the politico-economic theory of conflict. We postulate a Tullock contest success function...

The fact that conflicts tend to cluster in space is well documented. It remains unclear, however, whether this clustering is a result of contagion or of unobserved shocks that are correlated across space. We present new evidence for contagion by exploiting a natural experiment that increased the...

What accounts for low-intensity intergroup violence? In this paper, we explore the micro-level determinants of low-intensity sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which has marked the post-1998 peace agreement period. We use original cross-sectional time series violence data for the 2005-2012...

The recent increase in the number of criminally accused politicians elected to state assemblies has caused much furor in India. Despite the potentially important consequences and the widely divergent views, the implications of their elections to state legislative assemblies on constituency-level...

Despite the widespread occurrence of humanitarian emergencies such as epidemics, earthquakes, droughts, floods and violent conflict and despite the significant financial resources devoted to humanitarian assistance, systematic learning from such interventions using rigorous theory-based impact...

This document attempts to determine the impact of forced displacement on early childhood nutritional development. I use two identification strategies in order to address the endogeneity caused by the potential correlation between forced displacement and the unobserved heterogeneity of the...

Using a panel dataset from Burundi where information on protection payments during the 10 year civil war were collected, we test the relationship between payments, the nature of extraction by the rebels, and welfare outcomes. We ask, does payment to rebels insure against future welfare loss and...

The identification of the effect of wars on human capital tends to focus on the population of school age children at the time of the conflict. Our paper introduces a methodology to estimate the effect of war on the stock of human capital by examining the changes in the presence of educated...