There is growing awareness that development-oriented government policies may be an important counterinsurgency strategy, but existing papers are usually unable to disentangle various mechanisms. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we analyze the impact of one of the world's largest...

The excessive violence that has spread across virtually all of Syria since the 2011 uprising against the regime of Bashar al-Assad has so far prevented a serious debate about feasible solutions. Most political factions fear that any talk of a compromise solution will undermine their own position...

China’s provision of development finance to other countries is sizable but reliable information is scarce. We introduce a new open source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance to Africa from 2000 - 2011. We...