Compared to developing economies, European transition economies had high levels of human capital when their transitions began, but a lack of resources and policies to protect poor families hampered children’s access to education, especially for non-compulsory school grades. Different phenomena...

A notable feature of post-World War II civil wars is their very long average duration. We provide a theory of the persistence of civil wars. The civilian government can successfully defeat rebellious factions only by creating a relatively strong army. In weakly-institutionalized polities this...

Während das Thema grenzüberschreitende Flucht seit Jahren ganz oben auf der internationalen Agenda steht, erfährt das zahlenmäßig noch größere Phänomen Binnenvertreibung wenig politische Aufmerksamkeit. Das ist problematisch, da Binnenvertreibung Konflikte fördert und Entwicklung hemmt....

I examine whether and how the means through which a civil war ends affects the success of a country's state-building strategy after conflict. I show that two distinct modes of conflict termination-military victories and negotiated settlements-lead to differential long-run statebuilding outcomes...

A new dataset by Bazzi and Blattman (2014) allows examining the effects of international commodity prices on the risk of civil war outbreak with more comprehensive data. I find that international commodity price downturns sparked civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa. Another finding with the new...

In the course of the last decade, the IBSA states (India, Brazil, South Africa) have increased their weight in the shifting global order, particularly in economic affairs. Can the same be said about the IBSA states' position in the international security hierarchy? After locating the IBSA...

We combine original geo-referenced data on mining extraction of 15 minerals with information on conflict events at spatial resolution of 0.5o x 0.5o for all Africa over 1997-2010. Exploiting exogenous variations in world prices, we find a positive impact of mining on conict at the local level....

The building blocks of our model are bounded-rational actors with specific sets of endowments: ’entrepreneurial spirit’, human capital and venture capital. The entrepreneurial behavior to found a firm is triggered by the individuals’ endowments, their social network and the evaluation of...