We experimentally study how economic prospects and power shifts affect the risk of conflict through a dynamic power rivalry game. Players decide whether to maintain the status quo or challenge a rival under declining, constant, or growing economic prospects. We find that conflict rates are...

Biodiversity is essential for ecological stability, human well-being, and economic progress, providing critical ecosystem services such as clean water, food, and climate regulation. However, it faces unprecedented threats, with extinction rates accelerating to 1,000 times the natural baseline...

US drone strikes are popular with the electorate and overseen by the President. This pa- per investigates whether the US President uses drone strikes strategically for political gain. We document that US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen are sig- nificantly more likely...

This handbook chapter provides a synthesis of the literature on armed conflicts, with a special focus on development economics, while covering also other disciplines. The piece starts off with a discussion of the main consequences of conflict before investigating its root causes. First, a series...

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to nearly half of the world's fragile and conflict-affected states, where weak institutions and social cohesion, governance failures, and economic instability trap millions in poverty. Some countries have transitioned out of extreme fragility by implementing sound...

Wars fueled by resource wealth pose complex challenges for conflict resolution. I combine data on conflict events, rebel resource dependence, world market prices, and ceasefire details to investigate how fluctuations in rebel funding affect the likelihood of ceasefires. Increased funding...

Literature on rebel governance has examined various ways in which rebels engage with civilians, build informal governing institutions, and exert social control during civil war. When rebels win, how does rebel governance affect post-war politics? This paper explores how varieties of insecurity...

This paper examines the role of social protection in mitigating the adverse effects of conflict on household welfare. We assess the impact of a graduation intervention linked to Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme, focusing on Amhara, a region severely affected by the Tigray conflict....

We examine the intersection of two subfields within political economy: geoeconomics and conflict. Geoeconomics is primarily concerned with the use of "economic weapons " of coercion, while the conflict literature mainly focuses on military weapons and war. We propose bridging these two...

Here, we apply a novel framework, termed Subjective Game Structures (SGSs), for uncovering and analyzing hidden motivations in ecological conflicts. SGSs enable the examination of implicit attitudes and motivations within individuals and groups. We elicited SGSs from Israeli and Palestinian...

We investigate how exposure to conflict events shapes individuals' democratic preferences, focusing on support for democracy in general and perceptions of governance within one's own country. We examine how ethnic affiliation - whether an individual belongs to an ethnic group with access to...

We synthesize research on conflict as a fundamental economic phenomenon, arguing that the implications of the "dark side of self-interest" have received insufficient attention in economics. We define conflict as interactions where parties choose costly inputs that are adversarially combined...

The revival of economic nationalism poses a challenge to neoclassical orthodoxy, which claims that liberalized international trade is (subject to a few recognized exceptions) inherently cooperative and mutually beneficial. Post-Keynesian open economy models demonstrate that international trade...

This paper studies how female participation in household decision making has been affected by the ongoing civil conflict in the Republic of Yemen in areas under the control of the Internationally Recognized Government. Using a unique survey dataset that tracks households between 2014 and 2021...

How do rebel groups incorporate locals into their economic systems, and how do these civil-military relations affect the political dynamics of armed conflicts? This study explores the economic institutions regulated by rebel groups in conflict areas and their impact on the duration of the...

This paper shows how enduring agrarian institutions shaped the long-run political consequences of historical shocks. We study Italy's sharecropping system (mezzadria)-a centuries-old fifty-fifty contract that structured rural relations across central Italy-and link its prewar prevalence to...

Violent conflicts remain a nagging problem in Nigeria. Because Nigeria’s population is polarized along ethnic and religious lines, conflicts that have nothing to do with ethnicity and religion often turn ethnoreligious owing to the ethnic and religious identities of the conflict actors. This...

Agricultural cooperation is seen as a way to solve collective action problems and has been associated with high social capital and other beneficial impacts in the countryside beyond productivity increases. But what if it comes into conflict with existing private concerns? The Irish dairy...

We model a rent-seeking contest among two 'identity ideologues', differentially located along a uni-dimensional identity continuum, and a 'mercenary', who can choose any location in-between. The contest jointly awards an identity-relevant good ('religion') and an identity-irrelevant good...