Papers from the book project:
Land, Power, and Property Rights: The Political Economy of Land Titling in West Africa [Link to paper]
Rural households who obtain a formal, written land title for their landholdings benefit relative to households whose lands remain informal. However, the uptake of such titles remains slow and uneven, despite their availability. This paper illustrates how the local politics of customary institutions, alongside national land regimes, resolve this empirical puzzle. I combine 170,216 household-level observations of titling with a novel geospatial measure of both land values and the returns to agricultural investment. Households in areas with high returns to potential agricultural investment are more likely to title. In countries with centralized land tenure regimes, strong customary institutions attenuate this relationship; in countries with decentralized land regimes, strong customary institutions reinforce it. I also leverage an original survey of 801 households and 191 customary elites in the central cocoa belt of Cote d’Ivoire to trace how village chiefs capture devolved land titling institutions to discriminate against relative newcomers and reinforce their own authority. This research expands the study of property rights in the developing world by documenting extensive and granular variation in the uptake of land titles, by showing how local politics explain this variation, and by outlining the conditions under which customary elites impede or facilitate development.
Who wants property rights? Conjoint evidence from Senegal [Link to paper]
Why don’t more farmers formalize their land rights? Previous research assumes that households will avail themselves of formal land titles when they are able. The hypothesized benefit of land titling is increase tenure security, but where households lack confidence in state institutions, they may not believe that land titles will be advantageous in reducing expropriation. I use a field conjoint experiment of 1,164 household heads across rural Senegal to understand which attributes affect the perceived likelihood of winning a land dispute. Land titles increase the likelihood of winning a perceived land dispute for all respondents, but the effect is weaker for those who lack confidence in formal institutions. Social proximity to customary elites does not affect these results. A structural topic model shows that where formal titles are not a deciding factors, respondents discuss improvements made to the land when considering potential land disputes. Taken together, this paper shows how external attributes affect households’ confidence of winning land disputes and their eventual take-up of formal land titles.
Other Research:
Getting to youths: development programming, conflict resolution, and political violence in Niger [with Kathryn M. Lance, Ryan Sheely, and Ifeoluwa M. Olawole ]. [Link to paper]
What types of interventions are effective at reducing young people’s participation political violence? A growing literature evaluates a diverse array of economic, civic engagement, and psychosocial interventions but little is known about how different types of interventions interact. This paper presents a cluster-randomized control trial in the Maradi and Tillaberi regions of Niger. In the context of a broader vocational training and civic engagement program, young people (aged 15-34) in randomly assigned villages participated in trainings in Interest-Based Negotiation and Mediation (IBNM), an approach to conflict management. In a follow-up survey of 1,734 youth across 118 villages, we show that youth who participated in both Youth Connect and IBNM training are less likely to support violence than youth who only participated in Youth Connect a year after IBNM trainings took place. We find no difference between youth who participated in Youth Connect by itself and a pure control group. A difference-in-differences approach using geo-referenced conflict incidents corroborates these results: villages which received both Youth Connect and IBNM experienced fewer violent incidents than villages which only received Youth Connect. This research evaluates a promising intervention which is low-cost, light-touch, and can be layered atop conventional violence prevention programming.
Feeding conflict? New data on the impact of humanitarian food aid on civil conflict [Link to paper] Revise and resubmit at the Journal of Global Security Studies.
Does humanitarian food aid increase violent conflict? Previous measures of humanitarian food aid suffer from two problems: (1) they fail to account for differences in within-country transportation costs and (2) they conflate humanitarian and nonhumanitarian food aid. I introduce a new dataset of USAID humanitarian food assistance across 103 countries from 1991 to 2019 which resolves these problems. I exclude shipping costs by using tonnage of food commodities and isolate the humanitarian portions of USAID’s food assistance. I find no relation between humanitarian food assistance and the incidence of civil conflict. I also find that humanitarian food aid does not affect conflict termination or the duration of peace. These results do not change when I use these new data to proxy for the ease of appropriating humanitarian aid. By introducing new program-level data, this paper provides evidence on a disputed linkage and advances the literature on the unintended consequences of humanitarian assistance.
Pitfalls and tradeoffs in measuring support for violent extremism: Evidence from Niger and Burkina Faso [with Ryan Sheely and Adam Lichtenheld] [Link to paper]
Academics, policymakers, and other researchers use a mixture of disparate strategies to measure growing support for violent extremism in the Sahel and elsewhere. This paper leverage the confluence of five different measures of support for violence to explore differences in how each captures the underlying phenomenon. These measurements include an original survey on support for violence among 1,772 youth in Niger and Burkina Faso, qualitative rankings of village-level vulnerability to violent extremism by local elites, and data from ACLED. Together, this data allows us to 1) provide insight into validly and reliably measuring violent extremism – a challenge for scholars and policymakers – and 2) explore the extent to which commonly used measurement strategies capture the same underlying phenomena.
In Vi(vi)no Veritas? Expertise, review accuracy and reputation inflation [with Rebecca Janssen] [Link to paper]
Review systems including quantitative measures as well as text-based expression of experiences are omnipresent in today’s digital platform economy. This paper studies the existence of reputation inflation, i.e. unjustified increases in ratings, with a special focus of heterogeneity between experienced and non-experienced users. Using data on more than 5 million reviews from an online wine platform we compare consistency between numerical feedback and textual reviews as well as sentiment measures. We show that overall the wine platform displays strongly increasing numerical feedback over our time period from 2014 to 2020 while this is not the case for our control measures. This gap appears to be even stronger for users with less experience or expertise in wine reviewing. We conclude, that online platforms as well as potential customers should be aware of the phenomenon of reputation inflation and simplifying feedback to one number might do a disservice to review platforms goal of providing a representative quality assessment.