Tilman Brück

• D.Phil. Economics
• Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Governments worldwide responded to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic with various lockdown measures. Restrictions curb the spread of a virus but also cause serious economic challenges. Evidence on how the severity of lockdown policies impacts the economic behaviour of households in low- and middle-income countries over time remains absent. To clo...

Climate change and violent conflict are defining challenges of our time. However, it is not yet understood how they interact in shaping human welfare and food security, how their interaction shapes gendered outcomes, or how social protection systems can mitigate their impact. To address these knowledge gaps, we first examine how household food inse...

The detrimental impacts of wars on human development are well documented across research domains, from public health to micro-economics. However, these impacts are studied in compartmentalized silos, which limits a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of conflicts, hampering our ability to effectively sustain human development. This arti...

Despite beneficial cardiovascular effects, substantial long-term modulation of food pattern could only be achieved in a limited number of participants. The impact of attitude towards healthy nutrition (ATHN) on successful modulation of dietary behavior is unclear, especially in the elderly. We aimed to analyze whether the personal ATHN influences 1...

Small-scale agricultural and horticultural interventions play a critical role in improving nutrition and food security of vulnerable households in peaceful settings. However, scant rigorous evidence exists on the impacts and sustainability of such interventions in conflict settings. In this paper, we address this knowledge gap by analyzing the shor...

Complex humanitarian emergencies are a main driver of food and nutritional insecurity. Agricultural interventions are key to improving nutrition and food security, and their positive impacts are well-documented in stable developing countries. However, it is unclear if their positive effects on food security hold in complex emergency settings, too....

Background Mental health risks are high in conflict settings, but mental health research mostly focuses on non-conflict settings. Survey data from active conflict settings often suffer from low response rates, unrepresentative samples, and a lack of detailed information on the roots and implications of poor mental health. We overcome these challeng...

This paper provides empirical microlevel evidence on the gendered impacts of armed conflict on economic activity in agriculture and other sectors, combining large-N sex-disaggregated survey data with temporally and spatially disaggregated conflict event data from 29 African countries.

Background High ambient air temperatures in Africa pose significant health and behavioral challenges in populations with limited access to cooling adaptations. The built environment can exacerbate heat exposure, making passive home cooling adaptations a potential method for protecting occupants against indoor heat exposure. Methods We are conducti...

Objective: Providing country-level estimates for prevalence rates of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), COVID-19 exposure and food insecurity (FI) and assessing the role of persistent threats to survival—exemplified by exposure to COVID-19 and FI—for the mental health crisis in Africa. Methods: Original phone-based survey data from Mozambique, Sie...

Background Integrated school and home garden interventions can improve health outcomes in low-income countries, but rigorous evidence remains scarce, particularly for school-aged children and to reduce anemia. Objective We test if an integrated school and home garden intervention, implemented at pilot stage, improves hemoglobin levels among school...

The integration of refugees into host countries’ formal labor markets is increasingly recommended as a durable solution to forced migration. Yet, this policy response is a contentious political topic with little empirical evidence, especially in low- and middle-income host countries available to support policy. This article examines the impacts of...

Agricultural interventions are one of the key policy tools to strengthen the food security of households living in conflict settings. Yet, given the complex nature of conflict-affected settings, existing theories of change might not hold, leading to misinterpretation of the significance and magnitude of these impacts. How contextual factors, includ...

We survey efforts that track food security in Africa using phone surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic. Phone surveys are concentrated in a few countries mostly focusing on a narrow theme. Only a few allow heterogeneous analyses across socioeconomic, spatial, and intertemporal dimensions across countries, leaving important issues inadequately enumer...

Calculating the consequences of global public bads such as climate change or pandemics helps uncover the scale, distribution and structure of their economic burdens. As violent conflict affects billions of people worldwide, whether directly or indirectly, this article sets out to estimate its global macroeconomic repercussions. Using a novel method...

Background Training women in home gardening and nutrition has been shown to increase household production and consumption of nutritious food and contribute to women’s empowerment, but evidence is limited to short-term effects. Here, we investigate whether home garden support leads to long-term improvements in household nutrition and women’s empower...

It has been shown consistently in the literature that early life exposure to extreme weather events affects children’s nutritional status and related long-term health and well-being outcomes. The effects of weather shocks other than rainfall, as well as heterogeneous effects among population subgroups and moderators of this relationship, however, a...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis affecting everyone. Yet, its challenges and countermeasures vary significantly over time and space. Individual experiences of the pandemic are highly heterogeneous and its impacts span and interlink multiple dimensions, such as health, economic, social and political impacts. Therefore, there is a need to dis...

How does ethnic inequality shape victimization in violent conflicts? Our case study of the 2010 conflict in Kyrgyzstan tests whether communities with higher ethnic inequalities in education experienced more intense displacement. We find that local inequality in education between Kyrgyzstan’s ethnic majority and its largest minority robustly predict...

Definitions of fragility are focused at the level of the state, but this should not be considered to suggest that individuals with heterogeneous endowments experience a state of fragility in the same way. Nor does it suggest that all subregions of a fragile country exist in this state. In turn, experience of fragility varies not just at national le...

When looking at important indicators of well-being, there is extensive evidence that levels of life satisfaction differ between ethnic groups, such that minority groups by and large tend to report lower levels of life satisfaction than majority ethnic groups. A growing body of literature has begun investigating the relationship between an individua...

Food systems in many countries are experiencing a shift from traditional foods toward processed foods high in sugar, fat and salt, but low in dietary fiber and micronutrients. There is an urgent need to better understand drivers of changing food behavior, particularly for lower-income countries. This study analyzes drivers of food choice among chil...

Gender differences (GD) in mental health have come under renewed scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic. While rapidly emerging evidence indicates a deterioration of mental health in general, it remains unknown whether the pandemic will have an impact on GD in mental health. To this end, we investigate the association of the pandemic and its counter...

School gardens have become a widely used approach to influence children's food knowledge, preferences and choices in low-and high-income countries alike. However, evidence indicates that such programs are more effective at influencing food knowledge and preferences than actual food choices. Such finding may occur because school gardens insufficient...

In the last decade, well over $10 billion has been spent on employment programs designed to contribute to peace and stability. Despite the outlay, whether these programs perform, and how they do so, remain open questions. This study conducts three reviews to derive the status quo of knowledge. First, it draws on academic literature on the microfoun...

As the discourse around societal cohesion grows and policy makers increasingly turn their attention towards improving cohesion, understanding its role for the lives of individuals becomes ever more important. Our study examines whether the social cohesion of the immediate living context is related to the strength of Big Five personality traits amon...

A recent strand of aid programming aims to develop household assets by removing the stresses associated with meeting basic nutritional needs. In this study, the authors posit that such nutrition-sensitive programmes can reduce malnourishment by encouraging further investment in diet. To test this hypothesis, they analyse the World Food Programme’s...

Effective social protection is increasingly as essential to supporting affected populations in situations of protracted instability and displacement. Despite the growing use of social protection in these settings, there is comparatively little rigorous research on what works, for whom, and why. This special issue contributes by adding seven high-qu...

Integrated home garden interventions combine training in gardening practices with education about nutrition knowledge. Such interventions have been shown to improve nutrition behaviour in low income countries. However, to date rigorous evidence is lacking for their long-term impact. We test the impact of an integrated home garden intervention on ve...

Despite accounting for only 7 per cent of the world’s population, rural youth account for more than 10 per cent of the world’s conflict-exposed population. In 2016, alone, over 350 million rural youth lived in conflict-affected countries. Despite conflict’s being defined as “development in reverse”, however, we find a general lack of research focus...

We review briefly recent trends in food security and violent conflict and the quantitative literature discussing their interactions, as reflected by the papers in this special issue. We find a large diversity in experiences of food security and conflict, posing a challenge for causal identification which can be resolved by spatially disaggregated,...

We examine an implicit theory of change in multiple strands of development programming — that a desired outcome can be brought about by programming typologies that aim to spur development in another area. In what we call a “pseudo-meta-analysis” across five African countries, we link the location of employment programmes to stability-related outcom...

We review briefly recent trends in food security and violent conflict and the quantitative literature discussing their interactions, as reflected by the papers in this special issue. We find a large diversity in experiences of food security and conflict, posing a challenge for causal identification which can be resolved by spatially disaggregated,...

This paper analyzes the fertility effects of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. We study the effects of violence on both the duration time to the first birth in the early post-genocide period and on the total number of post-genocide births per woman up to 15 years following the conflict. We use individual-level data from Demographic and Health Surveys, e...

Community-driven development (CDD)-a widely practiced tool by development donors and practitioners worldwide-strives to empower and develop communities by giving them joint control over aid allocations. This is expected to improve local development, local governance, and strengthen social cohesion. However, the empirical evidence for the third outc...

In our brief review, we take stock of the emergence, in the last decade, of the “microeconomics of violent conflict” as a new subfield of empirical development economics. We start by de-bunking common misperceptions about the microeconomics of conflict and identify several contributions to economic theory and, in particular, to empirics, methods an...

This paper studies how conflict affects household resilience capacity and food security, drawing on panel data collected from households in Palestine before and after the 2014 Gaza conflict. During this escalation of violence, the majority of the damages in the Gaza Strip were concentrated close to the Israeli border. Using the distance to the Isra...

Efforts to evaluate third-party peacebuilding interventions are welcome but many studies rely on experimental approaches that might be at odds with the theories that underpin the discipline. Rigorously evaluating interventions ill-suited to experimental analyses is just as important, however, especially when programmes adopt novel approaches. In th...

Each year billions of US-dollars of humanitarian assistance are mobilised in response to man-made emergencies and natural disasters. Yet, rigorous evidence for how best to intervene remains scant. This dearth reflects that rigorous impact evaluations of humanitarian assistance pose major metho-dological, practical and ethical challenges. While theo...

We investigate long-term trends in intergenerational educational mobility in a lower middle-income transition economy. We draw on evidence from Kyrgyzstan using data from three household surveys collected in 1993, 1998 and 2011. We find that Kyrgyzstan, like Eastern European middle-income transition economies, maintained high educational mobility,...

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of internal violent conflicts, in contrast to previous literature which has focused on the effects of inequality on conflict. We use cross-country panel data for the time period 1960–2014 to estimate war-related changes in income inequality. Our results indicate rising levels of inequality during war and...

This paper reviews current practices and common challenges in the measurement of the causes, functioning, and consequences of violent conflict at the micro-level. We review existing conflict- and violence-related survey questionnaires, with a particular focus on the World Bank's Living Standard Measurement Surveys. We discuss methodological challen...

We run a novel experiment to explore the relationship between the perception of real-life risks and the demand for risk reduction. Subjects play a series of loss lotteries in which the odds are matched to the likelihood of lethal events in real life. For each risk, subjects can pay premiums in order to reduce the likelihood of total bankruptcy. Our...

We provide a review of theoretical and empirical contributions on the economic analysis of terrorism and counterterrorism. We argue that simple rational-choice models of terrorist behavior – in the form of cost-benefit models – already provide a well-founded theoretical framework for the study of terrorism and counterterrorism. We also hint at thei...

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to define the interactions that determine how secure a society is from terrorism and to propose a method for measuring the threat of terrorism in an objective and spatio-temporally comparable manner. Methodology/approachGame-theoretic analysis of the determinants of security and discussion of how to implement the...

The paper analyzes the incidence, the severity and the correlates of household poverty in Ukraine during transition using two comparable surveys from 1996 and 2004. We measure poverty using income and consumption and various poverty lines. Poverty estimates are higher than previously reported if controlling for transition-related labor market shock...

This study aims to explore poverty measures, its dynamics and determinants using Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) and consumption poverty. Our results show that the two measures assign similar poverty status to about 52 percent of households and that both approaches confirm poverty is mainly transient in rural Ethiopia. However, we find that th...

This study surveys the small but growing field of entrepreneurship and conflict in developing countries, which is also the topic of this special issue of the Journal of Small business and Entrepreneurship. We review recent contributions on how mass violent conflict such as civil war affects productive entrepreneurship and we discuss the contributio...

We investigate long-term trends in the intergenerational transmission of education in a low income country undergoing a transition from socialism to a market economy. We draw on evidence from Kyrgyzstan using data from three household surveys collected in 1993, 1998 and 2011. We find that Kyrgyzstan, like Eastern European middle income transition e...

Many Colombians are confronted with the ongoing conflict that influences their decision making in everyday life, including their behavior in labor markets. This study focuses on the impact of violent conflict on self-employment, enlarging the usual determinants with a set of conflict variables. Our estimation strategy compares three different estim...

This paper summarizes the micro-level survey evidence from Central Asia generated and analyzed between 1991 and 2012. We provide an exhaustive overview over all accessible individual and household-level surveys undertaken in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan - and of all English-language academic papers published using...

The paper explores factors that influence the household decision to leave internal displacement camps in the immediate aftermath of violent conflict. Our analysis is based on two sources of information: household survey data collected in northern Uganda for households that were displaced by the civil conflict, and geo-referenced data on armed confl...

Gewalttätige Konflikte sind vor allem in notleidenden Regionen der Welt verbreitet, es ist aber wenig darüber bekannt, wie die Wirklichkeit der betroffenen Menschen aussieht und welche Entscheidungen sie zu fällen haben. In diesem Bericht untersuchen wir, wie Individuen während des Wiederaufbaus nach dem Bürgerkrieg in Nord-Uganda zurechtkommen. In...

This chapter analyses the incidence, the severity and the correlates of household poverty in Ukraine during transition using two comparable surveys from 1996 and 2004. We measure poverty using various poverty lines. Poverty estimates are higher than previously reported, if controlled for transition-related labour market shocks. Poverty in both peri...

We analyse the effect of mass violent conflict on individual expectations in Northern Uganda. We find that the expectations of the future economic situation are negatively affected by recent conflict while the effect on broadly defined welfare is less robust.

â–º We identify research gaps and recent contributions in the economics of terror. â–º We focus on the human drivers of insecurity as a key topic. â–º Insecurity shapes growth, perceptions of individuals, and policy responses. â–º The economics of security policies remains large under-researched.

We use aggregate country data as well as individual level survey to uncover, for the first time, the effect of extreme events such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks on entrepreneurial activity. We find that natural disasters and terrorist attacks influence individual perceptions of the rewards to entrepreneurship and, more surprisingly, ex...

In this article, we estimate the total costs of the German participation in the Afghanistan war, both past and future. This is a hugely complex and uncertain calculation, which depends on several important assumptions. These assumptions pertain to the different cost channels and the shares of these channels that can be attributed to the German part...

We study the effect of living in an internally displaced people's (IDP) camp on economic activity choices in post war northern Uganda. As the decision to relocate from a camp is voluntary, camp residents may be different from returnees. We merge household data with micro-level conflict data to control for endogeneity (selection of households out fr...

The aim of this paper is to study the short and long-term fertility effects of mass violent conflict on different population sub-groups. The authors pool three nationally representative demographic and health surveys from before and after the genocide in Rwanda, identifying conflict exposure of the survivors in multiple ways. The analysis finds a r...

We study the effect of living in an internally displaced people's (IDP) camp on economic activity choices in post war northern Uganda. As the decision to relocate from a camp is voluntary, camp residents may be different from returnees. We merge household data with micro-level conflict data to control for endogeneity (selection of households out fr...

We address the pitfalls of averaging by exploiting the longitudinal variation in aid to identify sudden and sharp increases in aid flows. Focusing on specific events, we test if aid accelerations correspond to policies and shocks in the recipient country. For a large sample of 145 recipient countries and 33 donors from 1960-2007, we find that posit...