Projects

Ongoing Studies

My current projects use field experiments to understand how employment, training, and behavioral interventions reduce poverty and promote social stability.

Several projects work with potentially unstable youth populations in post-conflict nations–ex-combatants, petty criminals, street youth, and refugees–to explore and build theory on the links between youth poverty, social stability, and violence.

Ethiopia

More sweatshops for Africa? A randomized evaluation of industrial  jobs for unskilled workers.

Liberia

Street youth rehabilitation and behavior modification. An experimental attempt to modify time preferences and other behaviors to increase incomes and reduce drug abuse and violence

Ex-combatant reintegration. Evaluating a program to turn illicit diamond miners and rubber-tappers into productive farmers and community members

Community conflict mapping and resolution. Tracking land, ethnic, crimial and domestic conflict across 5000 households in 250 of Liberia’s most conflict-prone villages, and evaluating a UN mediation program that aims to prevent and reduce inter-household conflict.

Uganda

Micro-enterprises for internally-displaced women. Understanding the determinants of micro-entrepreneurship among war-affected women, and the connection from incomes and employment to child health and education, psychosocial health, and community/political participation.

Post-conflict employment and reintegration through vocational training. Evaluating a government vocational training in post-conflict Uganda on youth employment, including the impacts on community stability and participation.

Global

Commodities, long-term development and political instability. Exploring the links between commodity dependence, price shocks, growth and political instablity.

Completed Projects

Uganda

The Survey of War Affected Youth (SWAY). Exploring the causes and consequences of child soldiering and forced recruitment via a 10-year tracking survey of more than 1,300 youth in Uganda.