Africa is well endowed with potential for hydro and solar power, but its other endowments – shortages of capital, skills, and governance capacity – make most of the green options relatively expensive, while its abundance of hydro-carbons makes fossil fuels relatively cheap. Current power...

The accumulation of decent housing matters both because of the difference it makes to living standards and because of its centrality to economic development. The consequences for living standards are far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility, decent housing improves health and...

Using global data we examine the dynamics of migration from developing to developed countries. Origin and destination countries are characterized by substantial differences in incomes, political rights and cultures. Incentives as well as costs shape the decision to migrate. One powerful dynamic...

Thanks to anti-retroviral therapies, people living with HIV in developing countries can now have a near-normal life at a cost of a few hundred dollars per year. We postulate that given this newly low cost of maintaining lives, there is a moral duty to rescue those who are infected. The core of...

Many developing countries periodically face large adverse shocks to their economies. We study two distinct types of such shocks - large declines in the price of a country’s commodity exports and severe natural disasters - , both of which have occurred frequently in the recent past....

Following the wave of democratization during the 1990s, elections are now common in low-income societies. However, these elections are frequently flawed. We investigate the Nigerian general election of 2007, which is to date the largest election held in Africa and one seriously marred by...

This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries. Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem to...

In this paper we investigate the efficacy of illicit electoral tactics and the characteristics which make a society prone to such tactics. We first investigate the chances of an incumbent head of government winning an election. We find that in those elections in which illicit tactics were...

A key distinction among theories of civil war is between those that are built upon motivation and those that are built upon feasibility. We analyze a comprehensive global sample of civil wars for the period 1965-2004 and subject the results to a range of robustness tests. The data constitute a...

Post-conflict societies face two distinctive challenges: economic recovery and risk reduction. Aid and policy reforms have been found to be highly effective in the economic recovery. In this paper we concentrate on the other challenge, risk reduction. The postconflict peace is typically fragile:...