Political violence, adverse shocks and child malnutrition: Empirical evidence from Andhra Pradesh, India.

We analyze the combined effect of political violence and adverse climatic and health shocks on child nutrition using longitudinal data from Andhra Pradesh, India. The paper shows three key results using two-stage least square (2SLS) models: (i) the presence of political violence reduces the mean height-for-age z-scores of children by between 0.4 and 0.9 standard deviations and reduces the mean weight-for-age z-scores of children by between 0.3 and 0.6 standard deviations; (ii) political violence generates such a large negative effect on the long-term nutrition of children (measured by height-for-age z-scores) through a reduction of the ability of households to cope with drought and illness; and (iii) drought and illness have an adverse effect on child nutrition in Andhra Pradesh only in violence-affected communities. The 2SLS results are robust to a wide range of robustness tests. Potential mechanisms explaining the strong joint welfare effect of conflict and adverse shocks are the failure of economic coping strategies in areas of violence and restricted access to public goods and services.

Domestic Violence and Humanitarian Crises: Evidence from the 2014 Israeli Military Operation in Gaza.

Using qualitative data from 21 group discussions and unique survey data from a representative cross-section of 439 women in the Gaza Strip, we investigate how the Israeli military operation "Protective Edge" in 2014 influenced domestic violence (DV), accounting for risk factors at different levels of the ecological model. We combine our survey data with secondary data on infrastructure destruction across Gaza's neighborhoods, and use propensity score matching techniques to address endogeneity concerns. Our results show that the military operation increased DV, and that this effect manifests itself at relatively low-levels of destruction. Our analysis suggests that the mechanisms are displacement, a lowered ability of married women to contribute to household decision-making, and reduced social support networks.

The economics of secession: a review of legal, theoretical, and empirical aspects.

The aim of this paper is to present a review of the legal, theoretical, and empirical aspects of secessions from an economic perspective. This survey provides interesting insights into recent events such as the Brexit and the threat of secession made for instance by Scotland and Catalonia. International law does not grant a general right to secede, nor does it forbid secession. Furthermore, there are several modalities of secessions, which turn out to be important for new states that want to get an international recognition. For its part, the economic theory shows that the decision for a region to remain in a country (or a union) or to secede eventually results from a trade-off between the benefits of being part of a large country, on the one hand, and the costs often associated to more heterogeneity, on the other hand. The latter are generally more important for those regions which are "far away" from the central (federal) government. Empirical literature confirms the importance of these trade-offs and shows that decentralization may be effective to accommodate secessionist conflicts only if certain conditions are fulfilled.