3rd Walter Isard Annual Award for the Best Article in Peace Economics Peace Science and Public Policy

Abstract

I am delighted to announce the 3rd Walter Isard Annual Award for the best article in Peace Economics Peace Science and Public Policy. The award is named after Walter Isard, founder of PEPS, who was widely recognized as the father of both Regional Science and Peace Science. In addition, Walter Isard has founded PEPS in 1993 with the aim to create a novel outlet for peace scientists. In particular, PEPS was designed to attract contributions from an interdisciplinary community of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines such as economics and political science, as well as regional science, geography and mathematics. Moreover, PEPS was intended to combine both positive and normative studies alongside policy-oriented papers. Nowadays, PEPS follows not only the path defined by Walter Isard but also the advancements occurred in peace science in the attest years. Then, the 3rd Walter Isard Annual Award goes to “Armed Conflict and Schooling in Rwanda: Digging Deeper” authored by Andrea Guariso and Marijke Verpoorten and published in the issue 1 of the 2019 volume. The authors focus on a crucial consequence of armed conflict, namely the loss of schooling. In particular the authors study how armed violence affected educational outcomes in Rwanda. They rely on two waves of population census data and on a difference-in-differences identification strategy. Their results indicate that the violence caused a drop of about 1 year of education for the individuals exposed to the violence at schooling age. The drop was slightly larger for girls than for boys. While increased dropouts and school delays explain the drop in primary schooling, secondary schooling was mainly affected by a drop in enrolments. Finally, the authors find no robust link between subnational variations in the drop in schooling and the intensity of the 1994 genocide. Besides focusing on such relevant topic the article is also an example of how writing a research work. In fact, it is extremely good in terms of clarity and exposition. I am sure that a large number of scholars would benefit from reading it.