This paper studied whether the use of short message service (SMS) technology effectively informed Bogotas population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) about its eligibility to receive social benefits. Half of the sample population was randomly informed of their eligibility via SMS and their...

We investigate whether and how the type of unemployment benefit institution affects productivity. We designed a field experiment to compare workers' productivity under a welfare system, where the unemployed receive an unconditional monetary transfer, with their productivity under a workfare...

Intuitively, by increasing the opportunity cost of engaging in criminal activities, positive economic shocks should reduce crime. However, the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic shocks and criminal behavior is at best ambiguous. This may be because certain types of shocks...

While there is a large literature on how conflict affects entrepreneurship and investment, little is known about how the end of a conflict affects businesses and firms’ creation. The direction of the effect is not obvious as conflicts bequest poverty and inequality –reducing the returns of...

Despite a growing body of literature on how environmental degradation can fuel civil war, the reverse effect, namely that of conflict on environmental outcomes, is relatively understudied. From a theoretical point of view this effect is ambiguous, with some forces pointing to pressures for...

High-powered incentives for the military and security services have become a common counterinsurgency strategy over the last several decades. We investigate the use of such incentives for members of the Colombian army in the long-running civil war against left-wing guerillas, and show that it...