Wartime sexual violence is widespread across conflict zones and thought to leave a disastrous legacy for survivors, communities, and nations. Yet, systematic studies on i) the prevalence and ii) the social and political consequences of wartime sexual violence are fraught with severe data...

How does armed conflict affect social cohesion, that is, the social fabric of societies? This question is central if we want to understand better why some countries experience repeated cycles of violence. It is also a crucial question for the design of peacebuilding interventions. In recent...

This paper measures the macroeconomic impact of recent political crisis, protest and uprisings in Africa with the generalized synthetic control method and evaluates the role played by natural resource dependence on the modulation of the impact. We find that political crisis, protests and...

How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected armed conflict and political violence within countries? Focusing on Africa, a continent with a particularly high number of ongoing conflicts, this policy brief analyses the immediate and long-term implications of the pandemic on conflict and reflects on its...

In a social network in which friendly and rival bilateral links can be formed, how do alliances between decision-makers form, and what determines whether a conflict will arise? We study a network formation game between ex-ante symmetric players in the laboratory to examine the dynamics of...

While there is an extensive literature examining the economic impact of conflict and political instability, surprisingly there have been few studies on their impact on the probability of banking crises. This paper therefore investigates whether rising conflict and political instability globally...

This paper provides evidence of the long-run effects of a permanent increase in agricultural productivity on conflict. We construct a newly digitized and geo-referenced dataset of battles in Europe, the Near East and North Africa covering the period between 1400 and 1900 CE. For variation in...

Macroeconomic costs of conflict are generally very large, with GDP per capita about 28 percent lower ten years after conflict onset. This is overwhelmingly driven by private consumption, which falls by 25 percent ten years after conflict onset. Conflict is also associated with dramatic declines...

State-society relations are in flux across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), nearly a decade after the Arab uprisings. The protests and revolts that swept the region in 2011 arose from widespread rejection of the post-independence Arab social contracts. These were based on redistribution...

In the era of continuous and steadily accelerating technological change that started with the Industrial Revolution, economies and societies were repeatedly transformed in ways that can be traced to ownership of the essential and scarce factor of production of the day and command of the economic...

We investigate persistence and determinants of deaths from conflicts in a sample of 163 countries for the period 2010 to 2015. The empirical evidence is based on Generalised Method of Moments. First, the findings are contingent on income levels, religiousdomination, landlockedness, regional...

This PhD dissertation consists of four self-contained chapters in the field of development economics. The topic of the first three chapters is human capital in East Africa, whereas the topic of the fourth chapter is measurement of sub-national state capacity. The first chapter studies the effect...

Intimate partner violence is the most common form of violence against women in conflict and non-conflict settings, but in conflict settings it often receives less attention than other forms of gender-based violence, such as conflict-related sexual violence. Using data from the 2008 and 2013...

Intimate partner violence is the most common form of violence against women in conflict and non-conflict settings, but in conflict settings it often receives less attention than other forms of gender-based violence, such as conflict-related sexual violence. Using data from the 2008 and 2013...

This publication examines the role of border regions in shaping patterns of violence since the end of the 1990s in North and West Africa. Using the innovative OECD Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator (SCDi), the report looks at the growing relationship between political violence and borderlands...

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started in March 2014 led Western countries and Russia to impose economic sanctions on each other, including the euro zone members. The paper investigates the impact of the sanctions on the real side of the economies of Russia and the euro area. The...