Data collected in Eastern Congo suggests that in-migration leads to higher levels of trust and cooperation. Why? And what is the impact of NGOs on village level cooperation? By making use of fieldwork (over the last years I’ve spent more 1.5 years in the DR Congo) and using a variety of tools (social network analysis, experiments, surveys, randomized control trails and in-depth interviews) I hope to address these two questions in my dissertation.
This is my fifth-year as a Ph.D. Candidate in the Dpt. of Political Sciences at Columbia University. I received an M.Phil. in economics cum laude from Tilburg University, am a Graduate Fellow at the Center for the Study of Development Strategies and the Earth Institute, and have a special interest in fieldwork, methods and Africa. My current field projects include:
- An RCT (2006-11) in the Congo to learn about the impact of a large development project; [Tuungane1]
- An RCT (2011-14) of an even larger project to learn about community contributions and local level institutions; [Tuungane2]
- An all-the-households village mapping in Eastern Congo to understand migrant settling patterns; [Mapping]
- An all-the-households evaluation in Sierra Leone to learn about network structures within villages; [Kenema]
- A project that uses cellphones to map local level events in real-time from hard-to-reach areas; [Events]
- A field experiment in the DR Congo that uses behavioral games to learn how latent characteristics map to network structures; [Networks]
- A survey among workers to learn more about public goods provision. [Workers]
The data that will come in from these projects will be used, among others, for my dissertation and work on natural resources.
Peter
Note
The photo at the top of the page I made in a village called Luzira in Eastern Congo. It comes with a nice story.
