Civil conflict in Syria, started in March 2011, led to a massive wave of forced immigration from Northern Syria to the Southeastern regions of Turkey, which later had serious economic/political repercussions on the MENA region and most of Europe. This paper exploits this natural experiment to...

Greed-based theories of civil war predict that rebel groups will only engage in taxation and other state- building activities in areas where they lack exploitable resources. However, this prediction is contradicted by the Islamic State’s pattern of taxation across time and space. A new dataset...

This paper uses a global computable general-equilibrium framework with new detail on six Levant countries -- the Arab Republic of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Turkey -- to quantify the direct and indirect economic effects of the Syrian war and the advance of the...

Today, we face the prospect of a Syrian peace agreement with disappointment at its delay and frustration that, yet again, negotiators embrace a framework that ignores obligations under international law to include the participation of women civil society members. While the international...

Faced with prospects of a civil war escalating on their doorstep, ordinary people must decide whether to take up arms and join the fight, to stay in place and seek shelter in confines of the conflict zone, or to flee their homes in search of safer locations. Using original survey and...

This paper details the results from the first comprehensive survey of private firms across major urban areas in the Syrian Arab Republic -- including Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Latakia, and Damascus -- since the conflict began in 2011. This builds on the World Bank's Enterprise Survey from 2009 and...

War causes disruption. In this study, we examine risk preferences and self-control behaviors of young children from Syria as they were exposed to the Syrian war. We measure children’s risk preferences and self-control ability using incentivized games. To discern the effect of the war from...