Can cash transfers promote employment and reduce poverty in rural Africa? Will lower youth unemployment and poverty reduce the risk of social instability? We experimentally evaluate one of Uganda’s largest development programs, which provided thousands of young people nearly unconditional,...

To examine the impact of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide on children’s schooling, the authors combine two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide. The identification strategy uses pre-war data to control for an age group’s baseline schooling and exploits variation...

Economic shocks at birth have lasting impacts on children’s health several years after the shock. We calculate height for age z-scores for children under age five using data from a Rwandan nationally representative household survey conducted in 1992. We exploit district and time variation in...

We analyse the combined effect of political violence and adverse climatic shocks on child nutrition. Instrumental variable models using longitudinal data from Andhra Pradesh, India, yield two key results: (i) drought has an adverse effect on child nutrition in Andhra Pradesh only in...

After the end of a civil war that lasted for more than two decades, in 2005 hundreds of thousands of displaced people started returning to their communities of origin in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. We use unique data gathered shortly after the end of the conflict in eight villages to describe...

Forty years of low-intensity internal armed conflict have made Colombia home to over 3 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), the world’s largest population. The effect of violence on a child’s education is of particular concern because of the critical role that education plays in...

This paper offers a framework for analysing the effects of armed conflicts on households andthe ways in which households in turn respond to and cope with the conflicts. It distinguishes between direct and indirect effects, and shows that the indirect effects are channelled through (i) markets,...

Data from Uganda challenge conventional notions about the role of females during and after war. Women and girls recruited by the LRA play active roles and are not passive victims. We show how LRA treatment of females especially strict rules against civilian rape and the use of forced marriage...

This paper investigates the effect of conflict on firms' output value and input misallocation in the context of Palestine during the Second Intifada. Using a unique establishment-level dataset, we compare firms' outcomes and input usage over time across districts experiencing differential...