Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict

We estimate the causal effect of a large development program on conflict in the Philippines through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary poverty threshold used to assign eligibility for the program. We find that barely eligible municipalities experienced a large increase in c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American economic review 2014-06, Vol.104 (6), p.1833-1856
Main Authors: Crost, Benjamin, Felter, Joseph, Johnston, Patrick
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aid
Arbitrage
Armed conflict
Casualties
Civil war
Civil wars
Conflict
Control variables
Development banks
Economic development
Insurgency
Linear regression
Philippines
Political conflict
Poverty
Poverty alleviation
Project management
Regression analysis
Running
Shorter Papers
Studies
Violence
World Bank
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Summary:We estimate the causal effect of a large development program on conflict in the Philippines through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary poverty threshold used to assign eligibility for the program. We find that barely eligible municipalities experienced a large increase in conflict casualties compared to barely ineligible ones. This increase is mostly due to insurgent-initiated incidents in the early stages of program preparation. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that insurgents try to sabotage the program because its success would weaken their support in the population.
ISSN:0002-8282
1944-7981
DOI:10.1257/aer.104.6.1833