The main objective of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on the mechanisms that shape the relationship between violent conflict and collective action. Conflict dynamics in Colombia allow us to exploit rich variation in armed group presence and individual participation in local...

This paper analyzes the potential for regional collective action in Latin America in the areas of finance, trade and infrastructure. Seven priority areas emerge. First, regional cooperation within increasingly important global financial and trade institutions (the G20, the Financial Stability...

Designing victims' reparation policies and solving agrarian disputes are fundamental aspects to build peace after a civil conflict. In 2014, a ceasefire with the oldest Latin-American guerrilla took place in Colombia and a peace agreement was signed in 2016. The Land Restitution Policy (LRP)...

I study the causal effect of the foreign aid for development assistance —implemented by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)— on the intensity of municipality-level armed conflict in Colombia, for the period 2009-2013. To address potential endogeneity biases, I use a...

Spanish Abstract: El presente capítulo describe y analiza un proceso participativo llevado a cabo con el propósito de apoyar la construcción de acuerdos colectivos y un sistema de monitoreo ciudadano para el manejo sostenible de las cuencas de los ríos Suratá, en Santander, y Zulia y...

I study the causal effect of violence against social leaders on coca cultivation and land restitution requests in the Colombian context from 2012 to 2018. Using the timing of unexpected killings of social leaders in an event study approach, I provide evidence that the start of the violence...

This paper theoretically assesses the role that uncertainty plays in the intensity of conflicts. The standard two-player rent-seeking contest model (Tullock, 1980) is extended to allow for privately known subjective values of the prize. The conflict is modeled as a Bayesian game on which each...

In this paper, we study how between-group wealth and size heterogeneity affect success probabilities as well as aggregate rent-seeking efforts when two groups compete for the allocation of a pure public good. Unlike with previous models, we measure the utility cost of rent-seeking in terms of...

This paper studies the effect of strengthening democracy, as captured by an increase in voting rights, on the incidence of violent civil conflict in nineteenth-century Colombia. Empirically studying the relationship between democracy and conflict is challenging, not only because of conceptual...

This paper proposes a new identification strategy to estimate the causal impact of illicit drug markets on violence using a panel of Colombian municipalities covering the period 1994-2008. Using a UNODC survey of Colombian rural households involved in coca cultivation, we estimate the...