Christopher Blattman

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present evidence for a link between war, violence and increased individual political participation and leadership among former combatants and victims of violence, and use this link to understand the deeper determinants of individual political behavior.

TL;DR: This article found evidence for a link from past violence to increased political engagement among ex-combatants in northern Uganda, where rebel recruitment generated quasiexperimental variation in who was conscripted by abduction.

TL;DR: This article examined the case of Uganda, where rebel recruitment methods provided exogenous variation in conscription and found that schooling falls by nearly a year, skilled employment halves, and earnings drop by a third.

TL;DR: In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase social cooperation at the local level, including community participation and prosocial behavior as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: This paper found that volatility was much more important for growth than was secular change and accounts for a substantial degree of the divergence in incomes within the sample of small, commodity-dependent 'Periphery' nations as well as underperformance of the Periphery as a whole relative to such nations as the US and Western Europe, or 'Core'.