The paper discusses the recently promoted view that organized insurgent violence should either be conducted by activists bonded together by social capital ties or self-interested quasi-mercenaries, depending on the type of financial resources available to the group. We contrast this perspective...

This paper is based on work conducted by Imp-Act a three-year action-research programme aiming to improve the quality of microfinance services and their impact on poverty. Learning from the experiences of 30 microfinance organisations (MFOs) in four continents, Imp-Act is developing and...

This note presents a framework for assessing social performance (social performance assessment SPA), and how this information can be used to inform decisions that affect both the social and financial performance of the microfinance institutions this we term social performance management, SPM....

Recent literature in the political economy of civil war has pointed to the importance of (changes) in the economic environment for the understanding of conflict dynamics. Three channels, negative income shocks, the presence of exportable commodities and indiscriminate violence inflicted on...

This paper offers a framework for analysing the effects of armed conflicts on households and the ways in which households in turn respond to and cope with the conflicts. It distinguishes between direct and indirect effects, and shows that the indirect effects are channelled through (i) markets,...

All microfinance institutions (MFIs) have clients who decide to leave their programme. Clients may leave for positive reasons for example they might have outgrown the size of the loans that the MFI can offer and be graduating to formal sector finance. They may also leave for negative reasons,...

Both within and across countries, most attention has been devoted to measuring inequality among individuals (and globally countries). Within countries, increasing evidence shows that inequalities among groups (HIs) are important for wellbeing. However, the global component of HIs are generally...

This paper studies the labor market effects of migration-related supply shocks. We exploit forced migration caused by the Colombian conflict as a natural experiment to examine the impact of exogenous labor supply shifts on labor outcomes. While migration flows are exogenously produced by...