Publications (8244)
The toll of the COVID-19 pandemic is still being assessed. Meanwhile, new variants continue to threaten as the reservoir of infected people remains large enough for mutations to proliferate. Excess deaths, a global measure, are estimated at 14.9 million for 2020–21 by the World Health...

Over half of Zambia’s population lived below the national poverty line in 2015. In rural areas, where 89% of households are engaged in agriculture, the poverty rate was even higher, at 77% of the population. Coffee harvest at a farm in Zambia. Photo by Oleksandr Rupeta/NurPhoto...
A plethora of work has been done on the effectiveness of foreign aid. However, virtually none of the previous cross- country macro studies have investigated the impact of aid on social cohesion. Yet, in order to promote the achievement of the targets in SDG 16, donors and global partners of...
In this study, we develop an empirical framework that allows us to trace out a time path of metal prices. This framework shows that unpredictable shifts in demand, extraction costs and discovery of reserves, make estimation of the slope of this underlying trend an empirical question. Further,...
How does income inequality impact the propensity for and levels of formal and informal household debt? This paper assesses this question using the two most recent waves of the South African Living Conditions Survey. A range of linear models as well as a zero-inflated Poisson model are employed...
Development effectiveness is an ever-growing concern for development partners. Particularly in a world of increasing budget constraints and trade-offs, it is crucial for development partners to maximize the results of any development intervention. While the importance of a locally-led approach...
While much of the literature studies causes and consequences of war, the reverberations of peace have rarely been studied. By focusing on the universe of ceasefire agreements since 1993, we study the causal effect of peace on economic recovery using a regression discontinuity in time approach...
We still have limited knowledge about the long-term effects of fascism on European democracies. European countries experienced cycles of violence between the 1960s and 1980s. Can such violence be explained by legacies of mobilization during fascism? We study whether and how the Italian fascist...
This paper explores how the concept of resilience has been used in development studies. Set amidst the rise of resilience in sustainable development, it offers insights for scholars and policy-makers, alike. Sampling 419 resilience-oriented journal articles from 2017–22, it uses Kuhnian...
Different concepts of inequality lead to different positions in discussions about whether economic growth leads to increasing inequality. This study investigates how over 1,100 young adults in Mozambique perceive inequality and whether their perceptions are based on relative or absolute terms...
Development finance institutions (DFIs) foster sustainable development through financing, advisory services, and technical assistance. They complement public investments in developing and underserved markets to unlock development opportunities and deliver development results. Whereas DFIs...
Drawing from a growing body of literature on development aid in fragile contexts, this paper investigates the effectiveness of COVID-19 aid in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The paper uses the OECD’s Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States and...
I examine whether and how the means through which a civil war ends affects the success of a country’s state-building strategy after conflict. I show that two distinct modes of conflict termination—military victories and negotiated settlements—lead to differential long-run...
‘Country ownership’ continues to grow more as an idealized requirement than an operational concept for effective development co-operation. Provider countries often shy away from taking onboard recipient countries’ development priorities, public financial management and...
This paper studies the education gradient associated with health reporting errors for two highly prevalent non-communicable diseases among older adults in India. We leverage a novel data set—the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (2017–18) panel survey—to unpack the sources of...
Community-driven reconstruction (CDR) is an approach to post-war reconstruction that gives discretion to local community councils in establishing priorities and overseeing the implementation of reconstruction and development activities. A series of methodologically exceptional studies has...