Despite record economic growth in the decade that followed the fall of the Taliban regime, poverty remained stubbornly high in Afghanistan, and especially so in regions that suffered less from conflict. This paper aims to explain this puzzle by combining a model of conflict intensity at the...

This paper studies the legacies of wartime institutions, measured as rebelocracy, on the ability of households to cope with negative income shocks. Rebelocracy is the social order established by non-state armed actors in the communities they control. By providing public goods and a predictable...

With more than ten thousand casualties, the 2014 Ukrainian war between pro-Russian separatists and the government in the Donbass region, Ukraine's productive core, has taken a severe toll on the country. Using cross-country panel data over the period 1995-2017, this paper quantifies the...

Although most aid projects are aimed at local development, most research on the aid-conflict nexus is based on the country-year as unit of analysis. In contrast, this study examines the link between aid commitments and conflict intensity at the local level for three African countries between...

There is an ongoing discussion especially among political scientists and economists whether and how climate variability affects civil conflicts and wars in developing countries. Given the predicted climatic changes, several studies argue that increasing temperatures or decreasing precipitation...

This paper estimates the effect of exposure to terrorist violence on education. Since terrorists may choose targets endogenously, we construct a set of novel instruments. To that end, we leverage exogenous variation from a local terrorist group's revenues and its affiliation with al-Qaeda....

In this study, we look at the association between COVID-19 fatality rate and internal conflict, highlighting the importance of government economic support under the pandemic as a moderating factor. Our main hypothesis implies that increased COVID-19 fatality rates are likely to be positively...

Macroeconomic costs of conflict are generally very large, with GDP per capita about 28 percent lower ten years after conflict onset. This is overwhelmingly driven by private consumption, which falls by 25 percent ten years after conflict onset. Conflict is also associated with dramatic declines...

In recent years, there has been rapid development of the literature linking climate change and armed conflicts. Although no conclusionary evidence has been found of a direct link between climate change and armed conflicts, still climate change has been addressed as an important trigger,...

Anecdotal evidence suggests high oil prices embolden leaders in oil-rich states to pursue more aggressive foreign policies. This article tests the conjecture in a sample of 153 countries for the time period 1947-2001. It finds strong evidence of a contingent effect of oil prices on interstate...