We were asked by the Independent Evaluation Office to outline political science methods for assessing the chances of reform implementation in an ex-ante fashion. We agreed to illustrate how these tools 'work' by using Pakistan as a case study. The recent literature on IMF-sponsored reforms...

How can an escalation of tensions between the major ethno-religious groups be avoided in a democratizing Iraq? The first section explains why and under which conditions democratization may stir up, rather than palliate ethnic conflicts: when networks of civil society organizations have not yet...

The Petersberg conference held near Bonn at the beginning of December 2001 and the donor conference held in Tokyo in mid-January 2002 defined the broad outlines for peace-making and reconstruction in Afghanistan. Under the Bonn agreement, a loya jirga consisting of representatives from all the...

Auf der Petersberger Konferenz Anfang Dezember 2001 bei Bonn und der Geberkonferenz in Tokio Mitte Januar 2002 wurden die groben Linien für die Befriedung und den Wiederaufbau Afghanistans definiert. Gemäß des Bonner Abkommens soll eine loya jirga, die sich aus Repräsentanten aller Regionen...

Assigning students to school classes is a regular task for school administrators. With current practices focusing on equal class sizes, a balanced sex ratio, and pre-existing ties between students, schools miss out on a fundamental sociological insight: that social cohesion tends to benefit when...

Pessimists on globalization claim that liberalization of markets allows multinational corporations free reign, constraining local autonomy and precipitating a race to the bottom that will endanger recent democratic gains. The optimists see the end of dirigiste economic models as favorable for...

In this paper, we assess the effect of globalization on the distribution of income within countries, focussing on the influence of foreign direct investment. We analyze data for 72 countries, 1970-90. We incorporate in our tests the Kuznets (1955) curve, measures of the character of political...

This study examines the relative merits of grievance-based explanations of civil conflict that stress ‘Malthusian crises’ and ‘creed-related,’ civilizational clashes against competing propositions of greed- and governance-related explanations. The results from maximum-likelihood analyses...

We empirically examine the impact of oil wealth on property rights protection for a sample of 156 countries between 1960 and 2014. We find that higher levels of oil wealth result in weaker private property rights. This result is robust to different instrumental-variable approaches and...

We empirically examine the impact of oil wealth on property rights protection for a sample of 156 countries between 1960 and 2014. We find that higher levels of oil wealth result in weaker private property rights. This result is robust to different instrumental-variable approaches and...