We examine the human development consequences of transferring responsibility for public service provision to local governments in India, using state-level variation in the timing of administrative decentralization reforms. We find that devolution of the responsibility for health functions from...

The authors conduct an econometric analysis of the economic and social factors which contributed to the spread of violent conflict in Nepal. They find that conflict intensity is significantly higher in places with greater poverty and lower levels of economic development. Violence is higher in...

This paper describes the key challenges to job creation in conflict-affected environments in South Asia. It uses household survey data since the early 2000s for Afghanistan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka to document the characteristics of labor markets in conflict-affected areas, exploiting the...