Christopher Blattman

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study a government program in Uganda designed to help the poor and unemployed become self-employed artisans, increase incomes, and thus promote social stability, and find that the program increases business assets by 57%, work hours by 17%, and earnings by 38%.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors estimate the effects of one of the largest anti-vote-buying campaigns ever studied, with half a million voters exposed across 1427 villages in Uganda's 2016 elections.

Abstract: We study two interventions for underemployed youth across five Ethiopian sites: a $300 grant to spur self-employment, and a job offer to an industrial firm. Despite significant impacts on occupational choice, income, and health in the first year, after five years we see nearly complete convergence across all groups and outcomes. Shortrun increases in productivity and earnings from the grant dissipate as recipients exit their micro-enterprises. Adverse effects of factory work on health found after one year also appear to be temporary. These results suggest that one-time and one-dimensional interventions may struggle to overcome barriers to wage- or self- employment.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors assemble two decades of local violent events alongside hundreds of annual risk factors to predict violence early-warning in Colombia and Indonesia, using fine-grained data from the National Institute of Statistics.

TL;DR: This article developed and tested a survey validation technique that uses intensive qualitative work to check for measurement error in random subsamples of respondents, finding no evidence of underreporting of sensitive behaviors, partly because (we discovered) stigma in this population is low.