Search

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

As the size of the foreign-born population in the United States has climbed, political scientists have focused increasing attention on immigrant incorporation into American politics. Much previous work emphasizes the impediments to partisan incorporation for the foreign-born. Drawing from two-wave panel surveys of Mexican immigrants administered during the national elections of 2006 and 2008, we show that levels of partisanship for this population rise markedly in campaign environments. These shifts are largely in a Democratic direction. An experiment embedded in the 2008 survey demonstrates that immigrants are highly sensitive to political appeals extended by the Democratic side and modest amounts of exposure to political advertisements can have sizable long-term effects on party identification. These findings suggest that while the foreign-born may never possess the kinds of stable partisan orientations that are characteristic of native-born Americans, they are no strangers to party politics.

How do African governments respond to democratic electoral competition? Although the common perception is that African governments have sought to win elections by combining various types of electoral fraud, clientelism, and ethnic mobilization, I argue that democratic elections in Africa have also induced governments to compete for votes by providing basic services. One implication of this is a rural bias in the impact of democracy on basic health and education outcomes. Using individual level data from 27 African countries, I investigate the theoretical claim that competitive elections create incentives for African governments to implement pro-rural policies in order to satisfy the rural majority. The results demonstrate that democratic elections significantly increase access to primary education and reduce infant mortality rates, but only for children in rural areas. As the argument expects, these effects are conditional on the level of urbanization

The role of precolonial history on contemporary development has become an important field of study within development economics. Here we examine the role of precolonial political centralization on contemporary development outcomes with detailed subnational data from Uganda. We use a variety of data sets and obtain two striking results. First, we find that precolonial centralization is highly correlated with modern-day development outcomes such as GDP, asset ownership, and poverty at the subcounty, district, and individual level; additional results using an instrumental variable approach confirm this finding. Second, we find that public goods such as immunization coverage and primary school enrollment, as well as perceptions of local government quality, are not correlated with precolonial centralization. These findings are thus consistent with a correlation between precolonial centralization and private rather than public goods, thereby suggesting the persistence of poverty and wealth from the precolonial period to the present.

There is a heated debate on whether immigration is associated with domestic and transnational terrorism. As of yet, however, we lacked rigorous evidence that could inform this debate. As a contribution to address this shortcoming, we report spatial-econometric analyses of migrant inflows and the number of terrorist attacks in 145 countries between 1970 and 2000. The results suggest that migrants stemming from terrorist-prone states moving to another country are indeed an important vehicle through which terrorism does diffuse. Having said that, the findings also highlight that migrant inflows per se actually lead to a lower level of terrorist attacks. This research significantly improves our understanding of international and domestic terrorism and has critical implications for the scholastic approach to terrorism, as well as for countries’ immigration policies worldwide.\ud

We analyze the determinants of corruption in Russia using law enforcement data on corruption incidents for a panel of 79 Russian regions for the period 2004–13. We find that the relative salaries of bureaucrats determine corruption levels: corruption declines as relative salaries rise, yet at strongly diminishing rates. Furthermore, we show that even very limited media freedom helps to curtail corruption. Other important determinants are the strength of law enforcement, education levels, and unemployment rates.

This article draws on “regime theory,” particularly on the concepts of cooperation, compatibility of interests, and proclivity to compromise, to examine the rise of the Caribbean Educational Policy Space (CEPS). In making this argument, with the aid of a content analysis of 26 educational policies from the 15 member states of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), this article first locates the different policy mechanism of external effects, or policy tools, within the regional policy environment that governs and regulates education at the national level to explain how these policy tools and mechanisms have given rise to a very distinctive form of what I call educational regionalism that frames the regional educational policy space in the Caribbean. The data show that CARICOM utilized the noneconomic process of functional cooperation, and the policy tools of lesson drawing, policy externalization, and policy transfer to respond to pressures of globalization across three different policy cycles and concludes b...

Controversy sets abortion apart from other issues studied by world society theorists, who consider the tendency for policies institutionalized at the global level to diffuse across very different countries. The authors conduct an event history analysis of the spread (however limited) of abortion liberalization policies from 1960 to 2009. After identifying three dominant frames (a women's rights frame, a medical frame, and a religious, natural family frame), the authors find that indicators of a scientific, medical frame show consistent association with liberalization of policies specifying acceptable grounds for abortion. Women's leadership roles have a stronger and more consistent liberalizing effect than do countries' links to a global women's rights discourse. Somewhat different patterns emerge around the likelihood of adopting an additional policy, controlling for first policy adoption. Even as support for women's autonomy has grown globally, with respect to abortion liberalization, persistent, powerful frames compete at the global level, preventing robust policy diffusion.

Nonstate providers are often more important in the everyday lives of the poor than outposts of the state. In this essay, I focus on one type of provider, sectarian organizations, which are an integral component of politics and welfare regimes in parts of the Middle East and other developing regions. Focusing on Lebanon, I describe how sectarian welfare providers emerge from and help to constitute political sectarianism while tracing what is at stake for the poor. First, by holding public offices and dominating informal channels that mediate access to public benefits, these actors mediate the experience of accessing the “rights” of citizenship. Second, while they provide benefits and services that might not otherwise be available, the modes of allocating welfare by sectarian parties can be discriminatory, notably along partisan and religious lines. Third, sectarian groups politicize the process of accessing social benefits while undercutting the political voice of the poor by weakening alternative channels...

China’s controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinformation. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China’s population growth; that as a result China’s population continued to grow rapidly until after his death, necessitating the switch to mandatory and coercive birth limits; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led to a dramatic decline in China’s fertility rate; and that due to the one-child policy, China and the world benefited from 400 million births that were thereby prevented. Evidence is presented contradicting each of these claims: that Mao Zedong at times forcefully advocated strict limits on births and presided over a major switch from voluntary to coercive birth planning after 1970 (not 1980); that as much as 3/4 of the decline in fertility in China since 1970 occurred prior to the launching of the one-child policy; that fertility levels fluctuated and even rose in some years after the one-child policy was launched; and that most of the further decline in Chinese fertility since 1980 can be attributed to economic development, not to coercive enforcement of birth limits.

We analyze location choices of foreign-born science and engineering students receiving PhDs from US universities. Foreign students who stay in the United States are positively selected on observables. They tend to stay in the United States during periods of strong US economic growth and during periods of weak home country economic growth. Foreign students from higher-income countries and from recently democratized countries tend not to remain in the United States. Education and innovation may therefore be part of a virtuous cycle by which education enhances a country's prospects for innovation and innovation makes the country more attractive for scientists and engineers.

Over the past two decades, donors increasingly link foreign aid to democracy objectives in Africa. This study investigates whether and how foreign aid influences specific outcomes associated with democratic transition and consolidation. Using an instrumental variables approach for the period from 1989 to 2008, we show that economic aid increases the likelihood of transition to multiparty politics, while democracy aid furthers democratic consolidation by reducing the incidence of multiparty failure and electoral misconduct. However, we find little evidence that either economic or democracy aid influences opposition support in multiparty elections. These findings have implications for understanding how donors allocate aid and the political consequences of foreign assistance in Africa.