Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has emphasized war-related factors over political ones. For example, factors such as control of territory or characteristics of the armed groups have been prioritized at the expense of factors such as ideological alignments or local...

Since World War II there have been about fifty episodes of large-scale mass killings of civilians and massive forced displacements. They were usually meticulously planned and independent of military goals. We provide a model where conflict onset, conflict intensity and the decision to commit...

We use a new dataset from Burundi to analyze the role of local institutions as determinants of income, distinguishing between three distinct dimensions of the institutional framework: (i) property rights security, (ii) local political leadership and (iii) social capital. Using measures of...

The purpose of this paper is to identify the determinants of displacement behavior based on various push and pull factors at the village level. The study concentrates on changes in village population during three years of civil conflict (1999-2002) in Aceh, Indonesia. The empirical analysis is...

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...

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...

We test whether living through conflict in childhood changes political beliefs and engagement. We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1945 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries. Exposure from ages...

History offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time (like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe), while there are also cases of dictators who have displayed remarkable improvements (like Jerry Rawlings of Ghana). We show that such mutations can result from rational...

This paper argues that endogenous mechanisms linking processes of violent conflict and household poverty provide valuable micro foundations to the ongoing debate on the causes and duration of armed conflicts. Household poverty affects the onset, sustainability and duration of violent conflict...

Social tensions impede social cohesion and public goods provision. They can also be a driving force for more serious conflicts such as civil wars. Surprisingly, however, the emergence of social tensions has only rarely been studied in the literature. In the present contribution a game-theoretic...