The authors survey the recent literature on the mental health effects of conflict. They highlight the methodological challenges faced in this literature, which include the lack of validated mental health scales in a survey context, the difficulties in measuring individual exposure to conflict,...

The authors conduct an econometric analysis of the economic and social factors which contributed to the spread of violent conflict in Nepal. They find that conflict intensity is significantly higher in places with greater poverty and lower levels of economic development. Violence is higher in...

We examine the impact of the 1993 Land Law of Vietnam, which gave households the power to exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their land-use rights. We use household surveys before and after the law was passed, together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed...

We conduct an empirical analysis of the geographic, economic, and social factors that contributed to the spread of civil war in Nepal over the period 1996—2006. This within-country analysis complements existing cross-country studies on the same subject. Using a detailed dataset to track...

During the Vietnam War, more than 70 million liters of military herbicide were sprayed over the combat zone. This study uses self and proxy-reported data on cancer status obtained from a nationally representative health survey of the Vietnamese population (N=158,019), combined with measures of...

The authors analyze the interaction between a country's world market integration and its attitude towards gender roles. They discuss both theoretically and empirically how female empowerment is a source of comparative advantage that shapes a country's response to trade opening. Reciprocally, the...

Piracy off the coast of Somalia took the world by surprise when, within a six-year span (2005-2011), as many as 1,099 ships were attacked, among which more than 200 were successfully hijacked. In 2012 however, attacks had plummeted with no new hijacking reported between 2013 and mid-2015. The...

The differences in financial systems between industrial and developing countries are pronounced. It has been observed, both theoretically and empirically, that the differences in countries' financial systems are a source of comparative advantage in trade. Do and Levchenko point out that to the...

The author studies the persistence of inequality and inefficient governance in a physical capital accumulation model with perfect information, missing credit markets, and endogenous barriers to entry. When access to investment opportunities is regulated, rent-seeking entrepreneurs form...