This paper looks at the relationship between natural resource degradation and income diversification for fishing communities in southern Benin. We find that the higher the degradation of the fishery stock, the more fishers diversify their income away from the fishery sector. However, given the...

The economic literature has given due attention to household coping strategies in peacetime. In contrast, little is known about such strategies in wartime. This paper studies the use of cattle as a buffer stock by Rwandan households during 1991-2001, a period characterized by civil war and...

More than 200 years after its first publication, the Malthusian thesis is still much debated, albeit in a modified firm. Rather than predicting a global catastrophe, most neo-Malthusians stress the local character of the relationship between population pressure , natural resource scarcity, and...

Rwanda experienced several firms of internal violence, including civil war,genocide, reprisal killings and (counter-)insurgency. While these events all occurred in 1990-1998, their geographic location within Rwanda differred, with the genocide especially severe in the South of the country, the...

This article analyzes data on self-reported food insecurity of more than 50,000 individuals in 18 Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 2005 to 2008, when global food prices increased dramatically. The average level of self-reported food insecurity was high but remarkably stable, at...

Rich measures of micro-level violent intensity are jey for succesfully providing insight into the legacy of civil war. Yet, the debate on how exactly conflict intensity should be measured has just started. This paper aims to fuel this awakening debate. It is demonstrated how existing and widely...

This article demonstrates how fine continuous and categorical measures of genocide intensity can be derived from the records of the Rwandan transitional justice system. The data, which include the number of genocide suspects and genocide survivors across 1484 administrative sectors, are highly...

Important gaps remain in the understanding of the economic consequences of civil war. Focusing on the conflict in Rwanda in the early 90s, and using micro data to carry out econometric analysis, this paper finds that households and localities that experienced more intense conflict are lagging...