While transitional justice interventions are common in current post-conflict transitions, recent surveys in such settings suggest that public opinions often vary in their levels of support for such policies. Understanding such opinions is crucial for designing post-conflict policies that...

This paper synthesizes evidence from four recent “community-driven development” field experiments undertaken in countries affected by violent conflict and assesses prospects for “fast-track” institution building. Conflict-affected environments are presumed to be settings that combine...

This paper demonstrates that the randomization-based “Neyman” and constant-effects estimators for the variance of estimated average treatment effects are equivalent to a variant of the White “heteroskedasticity-robust” estimator and the homoskedastic ordinary least squares (OLS)...

This article presents a synthetic review of impact evaluations examining the effectiveness of community-driven development (CDD) and curriculum interventions in improving social cohesion in sub-Saharan Africa. The review found weakly positive impacts of CDD and curriculum interventions on social...

Considerable resources are devoted to ex-combatant reintegration programs in current peace processes, but evidence on their effectiveness remains thin. We use original survey data to study an ex-combatant reintegration program implemented after Burundi's 1993-2004 civil war. Previous...

This paper applies a regression discontinuity design to the Romanian secondary school system, generating two findings. First, students who have access to higher achievement schools perform better in a (high stakes) graduation test. Second, the stratification of schools by quality in general, and...

We show that pregnant women whose first clinic visit coincides with the nurse's attendance are 58 percentage points more likely to test for HIV and 46 percent more likely to deliver in a hospital. Furthermore, women with high pretest expectations of being HIV positive, whose visit coincides with...

This article addresses the question of whether incumbents can buy political support through targeted public spending. Using a regression discontinuity approach which takes advantage of the design of a recent Romanian government program that distributed coupons worth 200 Euros to poor families...

When students are tracked into vocational and academic secondary schools, access to higher education is usually restricted to those who complete an academic track. Postponing such tracking may increase university attendance among disadvantaged students if additional time in school enables them...

Vocational training and general education are the two predominant forms of secondary schooling around the world. Most studies that compare the effect of vocational and general education on labor market outcomes in the cross-section suffer from selection bias since less able students are more...