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The Dodd-Frank Act imposes reporting requirements on US companies regarding supply chain links to conflict minerals. Previous research uses within-DRC variation in the location of mineral mines to identify the effect of the Dodd-Frank Act on conflict. Due to the presence of spillovers, these previous estimates may underestimate the effect. Moreover, the legislation regulates reporting on minerals mined in the DRC and all countries surrounding the DRC. To fully evaluate this legislation, I investigate the prevalence of conflict events in the DRC and all surrounding countries. Difference-in-differences estimates suggest that, although there is no evidence of any reduction in conflict within all covered countries pooled together, the unintended consequences of this legislation within the DRC may be larger than previously reported. Supplemental analyses (i) investigate possible mechanisms that drive these results and (ii) find that the enforcement suspension of the legislation is unlikely to reduce conflict in the DRC.

Objective: We use feminist standpoint theory to investigate how the intersection of identity influenced wealth loss following the Great Recession among older single adults who benefitted fr...

This paper investigates the causal effect of corruption on entrepreneurship. We use staggered anticorruption investigations in China as exogenous shocks to conduct difference-in-differences...

As economic inequality increases, so does the importance of understanding affluent perspectives on the problem. We examine whether affluent Americans are more likely than others to hold individuals...

Does the involvement of foreign third parties in the management of a country in the wake of a civil war have positive or negative economic effects? The approaches used to address this quest...

In this article, we review evidence on the relationship between land as a productive asset and living standards in developing countries. We begin by presenting evidence concerning three key...

Economists and ecologists have worked for decades on measuring sustainability by supplementing or adjusting traditional economic indicators such as GDP. Given the threats to humanity from c...

Investigation of impoverished consumers and their behaviors has garnered occasional interest among consumer researchers, especially by transformative and public policy scholars. Part of thi...

Appointing or electing professionals to be public officials is a double-edged sword. Experts can use their rich knowledge to implement reforms, but they can also favor their own profession....

The rise of private tutoring globally has raised concerns over the hidden costs of “free” education systems and how these costs contribute to the persistence of inequality. We examine the drivers o...

A point of contention in the refugee crisis involves possible adverse effects on host communities associated with poor, low-skilled migrants with low host-community language knowledge. We use uniqu...

This essay focuses on three recent books that examine contemporary trends and policy responses to poverty and urban regeneration: Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty, by Scott...

We aim at understanding the triggers of electoral violence, which spoiled 80% ofelections in Africa during the last decades. We focus on Burundi, a country wherepolls were organized in 2010, only few months after the end of a long-lasting civilwar. We find that an acute polarization between ex-rebels’ groups is highly conduciveto electoral violence. In particular, we predict a five-fold increase in electoralviolence between the lowest- and highest-polarized municipality. However, neitherethnic nor political cleavages significantly determine such electoral malpractices.These results are robust to numerous specifications. We therefore argue that policiessupporting the transition of ex-rebel groups from warfare to the political arenashould be reinforced., info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Despite growing public-sector investment in education in developing economies, there are few studies that have examined the efficacy of these investments. In this paper, we estimate social ...

Do oil booms reduce rural poverty and inequality? To study this we measure rural poverty by counting people who live in darkness at night: combining high-resolution global satellite data on...

We investigate the unexplored link between the risk of poverty and happiness in the context of a developing country. Using unique longitudinal data, we estimate workers’ vulnerability to income poverty and find a strong negative relationship between vulnerability and life satisfaction, over and above the positive income effect commonly documented in the literature. The result is robust and cannot be reduced to the effect of two-sided uncertainty. A matched behavioral experiment shows that respondents are significantly loss averse. We conclude that downside risk is an important determinant of happiness and of economic decisions under uncertainty. Policies that mitigate downward risk may thus have direct impacts on both well-being and efficiency.

Existing research has focused on the extent to which transnational interventions compel recalcitrant governments to reduce levels of domestic repression, but few have considered how such interventi...

Anthropologists have long been interested in understanding how societies cope with risk and uncertainty in their subsistence economies. The topic has been of particular interest to the study of hun...

At some point in the first half of the 19th century per capita GDP in the United Kingdom and the United States began to grow at something like one to two percent per year and have continued to do so up to the present. Now incomes in many economies routinely grow at 2 percent per year and some grow at much higher “catch-up” rates. These events surely represent a historical watershed, separating a traditional world in which incomes of ordinary working people remained low and fairly stable over the centuries from a modern world where incomes increase for every new generation. This paper uses Gary Becker’s theory of a “quantity/quality trade-off,” consistent both with Malthusian population dynamics (quantity) and with demographic transition (quality), to identify a limited set of forces that were central to this revolution.

The Great Gatsby Curve, the observation that for OECD countries greater cross-sectional income inequality is associated with lower mobility, has become a prominent part of scholarly and policy disc...

Decentralized safety net programs provide much of the social provision in the US, yet the consequences for social provision have received remarkably limited attention. In this article, we e...

Natural disasters are increasingly causing displacements globally, and such negative impacts of climate change are expected to increase exponentially. Women and girls in particular distinctly endure long-term or gradual harms while in displacement, such as heightened risks of sexual and gender-based violence, including exposure to sexually transmitted infections and HIV/AIDS, maternal mortality, and forced or unwanted pregnancies. This article examines the Philippines as a case study to unveil the growing gendered security threats embodied by disaster-induced displacements. In the aftermath of the disaster caused by supertyphoon Haiyan, which struck in November 2013, the mantra of developing a “disaster-resilient nation” has gained currency among national and international actors in the country. Building on critical feminist political economy analysis, this article argues that the Haiyan postdisaster relief and reconstruction efforts constitute gendered processes that intimately rely on and mobili...

The growth of cities in antiquity is paradoxical: before modern health and sanitation standards, early urban dwellers suffered high mortality as a result of epidemics and chronic diseases arising, respectively, from propinquity and poor sanitation. At the same time, lower-status individuals within those cities would have endured depressed birth rates because, typically, many toiled in partially or fully dependent occupations not conducive to early marriage or stable families. The interplay between these compounding forces implies that early cities would not have been viable over the long term and could not have grown without a continual flow of immigrants. The early cities of Mesopotamia were no exception. In an earlier publication, I argued that the growth of the first centers that emerged in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the fourth millennium BC was predicated on migratory inflows that took place, in part, in the context of self-amplifying cycles whereby the replacement...

Despite the large individual benefits of guest work by the poor in rich countries, agencies charged with global poverty reduction do little to facilitate guest work. This may be because guest work is viewed as a repugnant transaction – one whose harmful side-effects might cause third parties to discourage it. This paper sets out six criteria for a transaction to be repugnant in consequentialist terms, and conducts uncommon tests for repugnance: It uses these criteria to formulate several empirical tests for the repugnance of guest work by Indian construction workers in the United Arab Emirates. It separates the effects of guest work from the correlates of guest work using a natural experiment that quasi-exogenously allocated guest work among a group of several thousand job applicants. The effects offer little evidence that guest work in this setting is typically the cause of repugnant consequences.

Countries have entered several hundred bilateral labor agreements (BLAs), which control the conditions under which source countries send migrant workers to host countries. What has not been fully explained, or empirically tested, is why countries would sign these agreements. We conduct a statistical examination of these agreements using an original data set of 582 BLAs entered into from 1945 to 2015. We find that the standard explanation for BLAs — that they are likely to be formed when potential host countries are dramatically wealthier and more repressive than potential source countries — is true for host countries in the Middle East, but this pattern does not hold for other countries that have formed BLAs. We also find evidence that countries that enter BLAs experience greater migration flows than countries that do not, though we are not able to verify that the BLAs cause this difference.

This article examines the effects of natural resource extraction on authoritarian governments’ provision of public services, using subnational data from China. Facing no electoral constraint that would reflect the policy preferences of citizens, Chinese local leaders instead allocate public funds differentially based on their need for quality labor in local economic development, a critical criterion for their political success. When the local economy benefits from natural resources, the need for skilled local labor dissipates, and leaders invest less in social services that enhance labor productivity. Using panel data across all prefecture-level cities (1992–2010), I find evidence that mineral resource abundance leads local governments to provide fewer public services for education and health care. Meanwhile, services unrelated to labor quality remain unaffected. The results are robust to the inclusion of key confounding factors such as FDI inflows and state-owned enterprises’ output contributions. Additi...

Since the earliest class-based societies, social leveling mechanisms have limited, actively as well as unconsciously, social stratification. Understanding how such power structures have operated in the past and present requires the integration of social dimensions to the political economy in a way that does not assume that elites and/or urban centers drive the course of history. Here, the Middle and Late Iron Age in southern Africa (AD 900–1650) highlight the importance of these local dynamics in tandem with broader regional changes. At a time when protoglobal trade links Africa to the Middle East and Asia, cities emerged up to 1,000 km inland along with the material evidence for hereditary inequality. Yet the population at the trade center of Bosutswe at the eastern edge of the Kalahari responded flexibly to environmental and social variables, which, perhaps unintentionally, limited the consolidation of power in the hands of the elite. The following case study of Khubu la Dintsa, a small agropastoral sit...

Political scientists have long been interested in how indiscriminate violence affects the behavior of its victims, yet most research has focused on short-term military consequences rather than long-term political effects. We argue that large-scale violence can have an intergenerational impact on political preferences. Communities more exposed to indiscriminate violence in the past will—in the future—oppose political forces they associate with the perpetrators of that violence. We document evidence for this claim with archival data on Soviet state violence in western Ukraine, where Stalin’s security services suppressed a nationalist insurgency by deporting over 250,000 people to Siberia. Using two causal identification strategies, we show that communities subjected to a greater intensity of deportation in the 1940s are now significantly less likely to vote for “pro-Russian” parties. These findings show that indiscriminate violence systematically reduces long-term political support for the perpetrator.

This article explores time as a vehicle of values in Fiji through an analysis of abundant nonworking time. The analysis centers on the Fijian chiefdom of Verata, where an appreciation of slowness, preparedness, relaxing, or even “time wasting” illustrates an alternative to abstract, labor-based valuation of time. The article employs a village-centric viewpoint from just outside Fiji’s main metropolitan area, in Naloto village with a dispersed citizenry comprising both salaried urbanites and resident villagers with no access to wage work. From their point of view, it is argued, time-wasting might not be as precious as a good job in town, but can be a bearer of value nonetheless.

Agribusiness has unprecedented leverage over highly unpopular Brazilian president Michel Temer, who is faced with several corruption charges and is struggling for political survival. In a little over one year, the agribusiness lobby and its allies have managed to erode thirty years of human rights and conservation laws. Indigenous peoples and their territorial rights are among the main targets of such policies, and there is no resolution to the situation in sight. With the insight of several scholars, the following forum assesses the consequences of losing the protection the Citizens’ Constitution of 1988 once afforded indigenous peoples in Brazil.

Scholars note that rebel atrocities against civilians often arise within rural areas in the developing world. This characterization is not far-fetched, and recent data show that rebel atrocities do predominately occur within rural agricultural regions. Yet the frequency of such incidents also varies substantially across different agricultural regions and years. What accounts for this observed variation in rebel-perpetrated atrocities against civilians within agricultural areas in developing countries? We develop a formal model to address this question, which contends that severe droughts can decrease food availability, prompting civilians to allocate food for immediate consumption and become increasingly willing to defend their diminishing supplies against rebels. This leads rebels to preempt the civilians’ defensive efforts by committing atrocities, which forcibly separate civilians from their lands and food stockpiles. In empirically testing this hypothesis at the subnational level across the developing...

The effects of the Spanish Civil War (1936¿1939) on entomology are evaluated quantitatively using publication-related data. The authors tested the hypothesis that all research results are equally affected by a period of severe disruption. This hypothesis is rejected, and they quantified the degree to which different research outputs were affected. The recovery of scientific production was fast; there was no major destruction of infrastructure. Exiles were not an important factor, and half of the entomologists were active both immediately before and just after the war. Important differences are found in the postwar period in relation to the international situation influencing Spain and the new organization of the state. A decrease is detected in publication in foreign journals, and there was less use of foreign languages. There was a growing importance of publications and scientists associated with the public sector. Conversely, there was a clear decline in research outside the public sector, and local learned societies recovered much more slowly than governmental institutions, which explains, for instance, the near-disappearance of publications in Catalan until the late 1950s. The study indicates that an abrupt social alteration will have a relatively minor impact on scientific production as long as there is a base of continuity of human and material resources and continuous government financial support., This research was funded by Spanish government projects HAR2011-28621 and HAR2016-76125-P.

War-winning coalitions face a unique problem of ensuring multilaterally credible commitments to the distribution and defense of a new postwar status quo. Some sustain cooperation for years or decades, yet others collapse into intramural violence. Why do some victorious coalitions collapse into war, while others do not? I analyze data on war-winning coalitions from 1816 to 2007, using an event history framework to model the duration of postwar peace between their members. Increasing coalition size is associated with less durable postwar peace, while more extensive prewar alliance commitments are associated with less durable peace and great power participation is associated with more durable peace. These results have implications for the survival of postwar settlements, for the role of alliances and great powers in preserving world order, and for assessing the implications of modern theories of war.

Using South African census data from 2001, 2007, and 2011, I examine the effect that immigration had on labor market outcomes of native-born black South Africans. Using instrumental variables to control for the potential endogenous location choices of immigrants to South Africa, the results show that immigrant inflows decreased the employment-to-population ratios and total annual income of black native-born South Africans. Additionally, results suggest a negative effect of immigrant inflows on the employment ratio and total annual income of black native-born South Africans employed in the formal sector. Results show that immigration caused an intersectoral employment shift. For black male South Africans, the composition of the employed labor force shifted to the formal sector, and for black female South Africans, the composition of the employed labor force shifted to the informal sector.

There is widespread belief that civil conflict in poorly governed countries is triggered by surging international demand for their natural resources. We study the consequences of US legislation grounded in this belief, the “conflict minerals” section of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. Targeting the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, it cuts funding to warlords by discouraging manufacturers from sourcing tin, tungsten, and tantalum from the region. Building from Mancur Olson’s stationary bandit metaphor, we describe some channels through which the legislation could backfire, inciting violence. Using georeferenced data, we find the legislation increased looting of civilians and shifted militia battles toward unregulated gold-mining territories. These findings are a cautionary tale about the possible unintended consequences of imposing boycotts, trade embargoes, and resource certification schemes on war-torn regions.

International migrants’ remittances are among the most researched subjects in contemporary globalization scholarship and policy studies. Most studies have examined the impacts of remittances on households in developing countries, and the findings are often positive and optimistic. Many of the existing studies have, however, presented only the positive economic impacts of remittances on households, with very little attention being paid to the equally important social impacts of remittances within the broad kinship networks that drive Africans’ lives and livelihoods. Remittances affect migrants’ kinship networks, patterns of family interactions, obligations, and expectations in the households left behind as kin attach meaning to remittances and construct values from them in ways that ultimately make remittances more intertwined and complex. Using primary and secondary data gathered in 2015 and 2016, this article discusses what we still need to know in terms of the relationship between international migrants...

We use data on three cohorts of university students in Italy to study how the Great Recession affected their drop-out probability. On the one hand, the deterioration of their families’ financial co...

Although early childhood care and education (ECCE) enrollments have expanded significantly around the world since the 1960s, little is known about the economic, social, and cultural drivers explaining this growth. Using country fixed effects and a sample of 117 countries, this study explores three predictors framing the growth of ECCE enrollments across countries and over time: economic development, improvements in women’s status, and country linkages to world society. The findings suggest that economic development was most strongly related to growth in ECCE enrollment before 1995 and that women’s status and world society indicators were even stronger predictors between 2000 and 2010. Analyses by country type suggest differences for developing countries and countries in transition compared with developed countries.

Theories of rebellion and revolution neglect short-run processes within state structures that can undermine their internal cohesion. These processes are evident in the rapid unraveling of the Chinese state early in the Cultural Revolution. Portrayed in past accounts as a culmination of student and worker insurgencies, an early 1967 wave of power seizures was in fact accelerated by an internal rebellion of bureaucrats against their own superiors. These led to the widespread collapse of local governments, diverting the course of the Cultural Revolution and forcing intervention by the armed forces. An event-history analysis of the diffusion of power seizures across a hierarchy of 2,215 government jurisdictions portrays a top-down cascade that spread deeply into rural regions with few students and workers and little popular protest. The internal rebellions were generated endogenously by events during the course of these upheavals, as individual officials reacted to shifting circumstances that threatened their...