We show the existence of a diffusion process of military dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1972 through 2007, using panel data probit estimation and a Markov chain transition model. This process is shortly-lived, since we observe an overall trend that reduces the number of military...

This paper investigates how the timing of elections and government ideological motivations influence the dynamics of social and military expenditure in a panel of 22 OECD countries over the period 1988-2008. Three basic results emerge: First, governments tend to bias outlays towards social...

Abstract: The immediate aftermath of an armed conflict is a key window of opportunity to build sustainable peace and security. Whether and how violence arises during that time has profound effects on a country’s political and economic development. Yet, defining and conceptualizing...

The institutional setting of the modern state is characterized by tax- ation, parliament, central banking and public debt. This work models war as a contest, where expenditures are funded in the financial market, and explores the complementary effects of these four institutions. If there is free...

A contest is a game where several players compete for winning prizes by expending costly efforts. We assume that the outcome of a contest is an ordered partition of the set of players (a ranking) and a contest success function assigns a probability to each possible outcome as a function of...

In establishing and consolidating strong centralized states absolute monarchs do not rely on sheer force alone but they also resort to the tactic of seduction whereby they buy the loyalty of potential rivals or dissenters. We argue with special reference to the lands of Islam that seduction is...

In this paper I use my way of thinking about dictatorship, developed in my 1998 book, The Political Economy of Dictatorship, and elsewhere, to “model” the North Korean regime. Initially, under the Great Leader Kim Il Sung it was a simple totalitarian regime but the shocks of the 1990’s...

Widely hailed as a paragon of successful post-conflict development policy, the Government of Mozambique has focused its economic aspirations on the promise of biofuel exports over the past decade. It has made hundreds of agricultural concessions to corporations in the biofuels industry. However,...

A group of agents must defend their individual income from an external threat by pooling their efforts against it. The winner of this confrontation is determined by a contest success function where members’ efforts may display different degrees of complementarity. Individual effort is costly...

In recent years, conflict research has seen a turn towards micro-level event data which often include casualty counts. This kind of data presents a challenge for statistical analysis, as it most often consists of long periods of no observations interrupted by extreme events with many victims....