In this paper, we address in more detail the question raised in Wacker (2011b): why does foreign direct investment (FDI) generally have a positive impact on developing countries’ terms of trade except in the case of South Asia? After arguing that such a negative relationship is generally...

International mediation of violent conflicts is commonplace in today’s world, and so is academic research on its features and effectiveness. But research that speaks to both the initiation and implementation of mediation remains relatively rare. This article outlines a theoretical and...

We investigate one of the world’s most pernicious forms of exploitation: child soldiering. Most theories can be captured by a principal-agent model that incorporates punishments, indoctrination, and age-varying productivity. For rebel leaders, we show it is almost always optimal to coerce...

Even though donor focus on employment has varied through the evolution of international development cooperation, there is nowadays widespread consensus on its overall importance as an overarching development goal. Employment promotion is however a complex task due to different target groups and...

In this paper we examine the impact of mandated reservations for female sarpanchs in the gram panchayats on perceptions of service delivery and women’s democratic participation. Using survey data from the Sangli district, Maharashtra, we find that the availability of basic, public services is...

This article describes how the measurement of the official Indonesian poverty figures has evolved since 1984, when Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS), Indonesia's central statistics agency, published its first poverty report. Since then, BPS has on several occasions revised the underlying methodology...

Exploiting DHS data from 235 regions in 29 Sub-Saharan Africa countries, we find that the combination of low levels of malnutrition together with dramatically high rates of mortality, encountered in Kenya\'s Lake Victoria territory, is unique for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the...

Over the last two decades Indonesia has experienced a significant decline in fertility rates and substantial increases in the level of education of women. Despite this development female labor force participation rates have remained roughly constant throughout this period. This paper explores...

Indonesia is, what the World Development Report 2008 calls, a transforming country characterized by increasing rural-urban income disparities and high poverty rates. Bearing these facts in mind, it is striking how little is known about causes and mechanism of the underlying determinants of...