Contemporary civil wars are rooted in a partial or complete breakdown of the social contract, often involving disputes over public spending, resource revenues, and taxation. A feasible social contract gives potential rebels something akin to a transfer. When this is improbable, and the potential...

Of the 41 HIPCs, 11 are classified by the IMF and World Bank as conflict-affected. Can debt relief reduce the level of violent conflict in these countries? By providing additional resources to finance broad-based public spending, debt relief could help to redress the grievances that contribute...

We evaluate the effectiveness of a post-conflict development programme on maternal health-care utilization in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. Our work varies from conventional impact evaluation studies because of the inclusion of two post-conflict psychosocial risks: the household's...