Publications

A common finding of the migration literature is that migrants are more likely to choose self-employment upon return to their origin countries than non-migrants. This has led to the belief that return migration stimulates entrepreneurship in source countries and hence supports economic development. In this paper, we test these assertions, drawing on the Life in […]

We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain.

We test the impact of an integrated home garden intervention on vegetable production and consumption three years after the intervention ended.

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The policy reform conducted in 2011 in Kyrgyzstan to increase the wages for teachers, health and social workers not only reduced wage gap in these sectors compared to non-reformed sectors, but also had a pronounced gender gap narrowing effect in the reform sectors and economy-wide.

At least 350 million young people living in rural areas are exposed to conflict each year. Despite the disproportionate levels of exposure to violence this implies, surprisingly little is known about how rural young people experience conflict, and in turn, about the programmes that can help to mitigate associated adversities.

We link employment to stability in five African countries to test if standard interventions influence complex outcomes. We show positive impacts on some indicators but negative externalities also arise. There are, thus, grounds for optimism but further work is required.

We explore the micro-foundations of fragility by discussing how to measure the exposure to fragility at the individual level.

A recent strand of aid programming aims to develop household assets by removing the stresses associated with meeting basic nutritional needs. In this paper, we posit that such nutrition-sensitive programmes can reduce malnourishment by encouraging further investment in diet.

This paper explores the long-term impact of individual exposure to ‘wartime governance’ on social and political behavior.

Violent conflict is a well-recognised driver of forced migration but literature does not usually consider the pull factors that might also cause irregular movements. In turn, the decision to leave and of where to go are rarely considered separately. This is in contrast to literature on regular international migration, which considers both push and pull […]

Over $10bn has been spent on programmes that assume that building employment also builds peace. We show that while there are good reasons to think this money is not spent fruitlessly, there remains a structural lack of empirical confirmation of these theories.

This paper summarizes the micro-level survey evidence from Central Asia generated and analyzed in the period 1991–2012. We provide an exhaustive overview over all accessible individual and household-level surveys undertaken in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – and of all academic papers published using these datasets.

We provide a review of theoretical and empirical contributions on the economic analysis of terrorism and counterterrorism. We argue that simple rational‐choice models of terrorist behavior – in the form of cost‐benefit models – already provide a well‐founded theoretical framework for the study of terrorism and counterterrorism.

We investigate post‐war economic activity choices of displaced and just‐returned individuals. In particular, the effect of living in an internally displaced persons camp on the choice of economic activities is analysed. Because individuals relocating away from camps may be different from those staying in them, a recursive bivariate probit procedure is used to control for […]

This paper studies how conflict affects household resilience capacity and food security, drawing on panel data collected from households in Palestine before and after the 2014 Gaza conflict.

We study the effect of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on various education outcomes for Palestinian high school students in the West Bank during the Second Intifada (2000–2006).

In our brief review, we take stock of the emergence, in the last decade, of the “microeconomics of violent conflict” as a new subfield of empirical development economics.

This paper analyzes the fertility effects of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. We study the effects of violence on both the duration time to the first birth in the early post-genocide period and on the total number of post-genocide births per woman up to 15 years following the conflict.

We investigate long‐term trends in intergenerational educational mobility in Kyrgyzstan and find that Kyrgyzstan maintained high educational mobility, comparable to levels during the Soviet era. However, younger cohorts, exposed to the transition during their school years, experienced a rapid decline in educational mobility.