Economics serving society
Oliver Vanden Eynde

Oliver Vanden Eynde

Chaired Professor at PSE

Researcher CNRS

Campus Jourdan – 48 Boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris

5th floor, office 59

Phone +33(0)1 80 52 17 22

  • Human capital and development
  • Political economy of development
  • Political Economy and Institutions

I'm a researcher (chargé de recherche) at the CNRS and a professor at PSE. I'm also affiliated with the CEPR. My research focuses on civil conflict, crime, economic development, rural infrastructure and the role of the military and police in developing countries. I'm the co-director of PSE's PPD programme and the Development group

Publications

"Fiscal Incentives for Conflict: Evidence from India's Red Corridor" (working paper), joint with Jacob Shapiro, Review of Economics and Statistics (2023), Vol. 105 (1).

"Security Transitions" (working paper), joint with Thiemo Fetzer, Pedro CL Souza, and Austin Wright, American Economic Review (2021), Vol.111 (7).

"Trickle-down Ethnic Politics: Drunk and Absent in the Kenya Police Force (1957-1970)" (working paper), joint with Patrick Kuhn and Alex Moradi, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2018).

"Targets of violence: Evidence from India's Naxalite Conflict" (working paper), Economic Journal (2018). 

"Building connections: Political corruption and road construction in India(working paper), joint with Jonathan Lehne and Jacob Shapiro, Journal of Development Economics (2018), Vol.131.

"Economic determinants of the Maoist Conflict in India", joint with Maitreesh Ghatak, Economic and Political Weekly (2017), Vol.52 (39).

"Military service and human capital accumulation: evidence from colonial Punjab"Journal of Human Resources (2016), Vol.51 (4). 

Working Papers

"Losing on the Home Front? Battlefield Casualties, Media, and Public Support for Foreign Interventions", joint with Thiemo Fetzer, Pedro CL Souza, and Austin Wright. (R&R, American Journal of Political Science)

 We study the impact of battlefield casualties and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop fatalities, we leverage the otherwise exogenous timing of survey collection across 26,218 respondents from eight members of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Quasi-experimental evidence demonstrates that fatalities increase coverage of the Afghan conflict and public demand for withdrawal. Evidence from a survey experiment replicates the main results. To estimate the media mechanism, we leverage a news pressure design and find that major sporting matches occurring around the time of battlefield casualties drive down subsequent coverage and significantly weaken the effect of casualties on support for war termination. These results highlight the crucial role that media play in shaping public support for foreign military interventions.

"Complementarities in Infrastructure: Evidence from Indian Agriculture", with Liam Wren-Lewis. (submitted)

Complementarities between infrastructure projects have been understudied. Our paper examines interactions in the impacts of large-scale road construction, electrification, and mobile phone coverage programs in rural India. We find strong evidence of complementary impacts between roads and electricity on agricultural production: dry season cropping increases significantly when villages receive both, but not when they receive one without the other. These complementarities are associated with a shift of cropping patterns towards market crops and with improved economic conditions.  In contrast, we find no consistent evidence of complementarities for the mobile coverage program. 

"Cooperation between National Armies: Evidence from the Sahel borders", with Marion Richard.

The effectiveness of security operations often depends on cooperation between different national armies. Such cooperation can be particularly important when international borders are porous. In this project, we investigate how the creation of an international armed force that could operate across international borders (the G5-Sahel Joint Force) affected conflict dynamics in the Sahel region. Relying on a regression discontinuity design, we find that the G5 mission lowered the intensity of conflict locally in its zone of operation. Further analysis of geographical conflict propagation patterns indicates that the G5-Sahel force facilitated security operations in border areas.

Books

"Infrastructures et Développement Rural: L'exemple de l'Inde" (in French), joint with Liam Wren-Lewis. «Collection du Cepremap» n°61 (forthcoming 2023), Editions Rue d'Ulm, Paris.

Work in Progress

“Bidding for Roads”, joint with Jonathan Lehne and Jacob Shapiro. 

“Fighting together”, joint with Thiemo Fetzer and Austin Wright. 

Dormant papers

"Coup-friendly Institutions and Apolitical Militaries: a Theory of Optimal Military Influence"

"Connecting the Red Corridor: Infrastructure Development in Conflict Zones", joint with Jamie Hansen-Lewis, Jacob Shapiro, and Austin Wright.   
A description of the data we collected is provided in an IGC Working Paper, and our descriptive analysis is summarized in an IGC Policy Brief.

"From muscle drain to brain gain: the long-term effects of Gurkha recruitment in Nepal", with François Libois, Ritu Muralidharan, and Juni Singh.

 

Research Grants

COOPCONFLICT  (ANR).

 

Teaching

PSE Summer School

Microeconomics, Markets and market failures : theory and public policies (PPD, M1)

Political Economy II (PPD and APE, M2)