Can employment reduce lawlessness and rebellion? A field experiment with high-risk men in a fragile state

Abstract

States and aid agencies use employment programs to rehabilitate high-risk men in the belief that peaceful work opportunities will deter them from crime and violence. Rigorous evidence is rare. We experimentally evaluate a program of agricultural training, capital inputs, and counseling for Liberian ex-fighters who were illegally mining or occupying rubber plantations. 14 months after the program ended, men who accepted the program offer increased their farm employment and profits, and shifted work hours away from illicit activities. Men also reduced interest in mercenary work in a nearby war. Finally, some men did not receive their capital inputs but expected a future cash transfer instead, and they reduced illicit and mercenary activities most of all. The evidence suggests that illicit and mercenary labor supply responds to small changes in returns to peaceful work, especially future and ongoing incentives. But the impacts of training alone, without capital, appear to be low.

Estimating the Effect of Treatments Allocated by Randomized Waiting Lists.

“…After the second Liberian civil war, some ex-fighters started engaging in illegal activities, and working abroad as mercenaries. Blattman & Annan (2016) 6 study the effect of an agricultural training on their employment and on their social networks. By improving their labor market opportunities, the program hoped to reduce their interest in illegal and mercenary activities, and to sever their relationships with other ex-combatants.…”

“…For the first two outcomes, the estimated difference between the mean of Y ik (0) of takers and non-takers is large, which may explain why the EO and DREO estimators differ. (2016), for the outcome variables in Column 1, and with the same controls as in Blattman & Annan (2016). The EO estimators are computed using all the waitlists, while the DREO estimators are computed excluding one waitlist that had less than two seats.…”

“…Blattman & Annan (2016) is one of the few articles in our survey in Section ?? whose data is not proprietary.…”

Can unconditional cash transfers mitigate the impact of civil conflict on acute child malnutrition in Yemen?: Evidence from the national social protection monitoring survey

“…Operational evaluations of cash transfers in fragile and conflict-affected areas suggest that the risks of diversion, corruptible behavior, and insecurity concerns are largely overstated or at least are not greater than in the case of in-kind transfers, such as food assistance (Chene 2010;Gordon 2015;Bailey and Harvey 2015;Doocey and Tappis 2016). Moreover, cash transfers have been found to facilitate the reintegration of ex-combatants into their local communities (Gilligan et al 2012;Annan and Blattman 2016) and, in some settings, reduce the risk of civil conflict in fragile communities (Crost et al 2016). However, there is little scientific evidence on the effectiveness of unconditional cash transfers on food security and nutrition outcomes in fragile contexts and conflict zones.…”

Job Loss, Credit and Crime in Colombia

“…Each of these effects might lead to increases in criminality, but with vastly different implications for how to combat or insulate against these criminal responses to employment shocks. While canonical models of criminal activity emphasize economic incentives (Becker, 1968;Ehrlich, 1973), empirical studies of criminal activity document the importance of both economic incentives (Bignon et al, 2016;Blattman and Annan, 2015;Watson et al, 2019) and a myriad of other behavioral and psychological drivers (Anderson et al, 2015;Blattman et al, 2017;Bondurant et al, 2018;Carpenter, 2005;Lindo et al, 2018).…”