We show that armed conflict affects social capital as measured by trust and associational membership. Using the case of Uganda and two rounds of nationally representative individual-level data bracketing a large number of battle events, we find that self-reported generalized trust and...

This article analyzes data on self-reported food insecurity of more than 50,000 individuals in 18 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2005 to 2008, when global food prices increased dramatically. The average level of self-reported food insecurity was high but remarkably stable, at...

More than 200 years after its first publication, the Malthusian thesis is still much debated, albeit in a modified form. Rather than predicting a global catastrophe, most neo-Malthusians stress the local character of the relationship between population pressure , natural resource scarcity, and...

Rich measures of micro-level violent intensity are jey for succesfully providing insight into the legacy of civil war. Yet, the debate on how exactly conflict intensity should be measured has just started. This paper aims to fuel this awakening debate. It is demonstrated how existing and widely...

This article demonstrates how Â…ne continuous and categorical measures of genocide intensity can be derived from the records of the Rwandan transitional justice system. The data, which include the number of genocide suspects and genocide survivors across 1484 administrative sectors, are...

Investigating the impact of armed conflict on schooling in Rwanda, we present four key findings. First, we find a strong drop in schooling, both when using DHS data and when relying on two waves of population census data bracketing the violence. Second, in contrast to previous findings, we show...

This paper looks at the relationship between natural resource degradation and income diversification for fishing communities in southern Benin. We find that the higher the degradation of the fishery stock, the more fishers diversify their income away from the fishery sector. However, given the...

The economic literature has given due attention to household coping strategies in peacetime. In contrast, little is known about such strategies in wartime. This paper studies the use of cattle as a buffer stock by Rwandan households during 1991-2001, a period characterized by civil war and...

Rwanda experienced several forms of internal violence, including civil war,genocide, reprisal killings and (counter-)insurgency. While these events all occurred in 1990-1998, their geographic location within Rwanda differred, with the genocide especially severe in the South of the country, the...

We provide the first quantitative analysis to scrutinize the ample ethnographic evidence that magico-religious beliefs affect the demand for conventional healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa. We rely on the unique case of Benin, where Voodoo-adherence is freely reported, and varies greatly within...