"Why do some political leaders create and strengthen institutions such as title registries and land tribunals that secure property rights to land, while others neglect these institutions or destroy those that already exist? How do these institutions evolve once they have been established? This...

Why are some countries more successful at carrying out post-conflict reconstruction programmes than others? Why has Sierra Leone been more successful in the reform of its armed forces than Liberia has after the end of the Mano River Basin wars? This paper argues that the diverging outcomes are...

This Element weaves together literatures on autochthony and belonging and on African urbanism to shed new light on the ability of the African state to undertake development interventions in some of the most important urban centers on the continent. It explains variations in levels of trust in...

Why are some countries more successful at carrying out post-conflict reconstruction programmes than others? Why has Sierra Leone been more successful in the reform of its armed forces than Liberia has after the end of the Mano River Basin wars? This paper argues that the diverging outcomes are...

How do production firms adapt to civil war? The answer to this question will inform the potential for economic development during and after conflict. Many businesses survive violent conflict, and in some cases even thrive. Understanding these successes will help policymakers to support the...

This paper describes the very different role played by female elites in contemporary developing countries, as compared to the ‘early’ industrializing countries of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It shows that women are far more important in business and politics in today’s...

Community-based development has been criticized for its inadequate understanding of power relationships at the local level, which thus leaves room for elite capture. This paper compares and contrasts two case studies, both of which take power seriously in their institutional designs. The solar...

South African household surveys typically contain coarsened earnings data, which consist of a mixture of missing earnings values, point responses and interval-censored responses. This paper uses sequential regression multivariate imputation to impute missing and interval-censored values in the...