We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the role of civilian agency in conflict; on wartime...

Widespread hunger and malnutrition persist today despite considerable growth in per capita food availability. This has prompted an evolving conceptualization of food security and of mechanisms to attain and maintain food security. This chapter discusses both food security and food assistance...

What are the links between climate change, epidemics and socioeconomic inequality? While recent epidemics have focused attention on the effects of epidemics on economic outcomes, and a separate literature in climate science and environmental health has linked global environmental change to...

Successful economic development is usually characterized by two salient phenomena: industrialization and demographic transition. Chronologically both events happen so closely to each other that historians and economists alike suspect that they are interrelated. This paper develops a theory for...

In a global sample of around 310,000 couples, men whose firstborn child is a girl (instead of a boy) are 10 percent less likely to strangle their partner each year. The probability that they kick, punch, or slap her also decreases by about 4 percent. These are causal effects under the assumption...

In communities highly dependent on rain fed agriculture for their livelihoods, the common occurrence of climatic shocks such as droughts can lower the opportunity cost of having children, and raise fertility. Using longitudinal household data from Madagascar, we estimate the causal effect of...

This article examines the effects of fostering on children's labour supply and schooling in host families in Niger. The focus is on the causal role of ethnic inherited cultural values and behaviours in perpetuating fostering. In particular, at the ethnic group level, we rely on the inherited...

This paper builds a world atlas of child penalties in employment based on micro data from 134 countries. The estimation of child penalties is based on pseudo-event studies of first child birth using cross-sectional data. The pseudo-event studies are validated against true event studies using...

This research advances the hypothesis that resource abundant economies characterized by a socially cohesive workforce and network externalities triggered the emergence of efficiency-enhancing inclusive institutions designed to restrict mobility and to enhance the attachment of community members...