Developing countries have increasingly engaged in Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) to attract foreign investors. While it is found that BITs are successful in attracting FDI, we argue that the effectiveness of BITs depends on the type of FDI. We find the effect of BITs to differ importantly...

It has been shown that armed conflict in Rwanda had a strong negative impact on schooling. Huge gaps remain, however, in our understanding of its heterogeneous effects across subgroups and the underlying mechanisms. Relying on population census data, we show that - in contrast to previous...

The recent spikes of global food prices induced a rapid increase in mass media coverage, public policy attention, and donor funding for food security, and for agriculture and rural poverty. This has occurred while the shift from "low" to "high" food prices has induced a shift in (demographic or...

For decades, despite widespread hunger and severe malnutrition in developing countries there was little attention to agricultural development and food security, and global funding for it was declining. High and volatile food prices have caused a dramatic turnaround in public and political...

Does higher resource inequality between ethnic groups lead to ethnic conflict? In this paper, we empirically investigate this question by constructing a new measure of inequality using rainfall on ethnic homelands during the plant-growing season. Our dataset covers the period 1982-2001 and...