This article reviews the literature on civil conflict and development with a focus on the socioeconomic consequences of violence and on promising policies for fostering peace. We make four main points. First, one of the reasons conflict is still often overlooked as key factor for development is...

This paper attempts to reconcile the apparent contradiction between two strands of the literature on the effects of financial intermediation on economic activity. On the one hand, the empirical growth literature finds a positive effect of financial depth as measured by, for instance, private...

We address the question of whether growth and welfare can be higher in crisis prone economies. First, we show that there is a robust empirical link between per-capita GDP growth and negative skewness of credit growth across countries with active financial markets. That is, countries that have...