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 display a varying degree of complementarity. Individual effort is costly and...

This paper analyzes the relationship between youth unemployment and Palestinian violence. First a qualitative explanation of the underlying mechanism is given. Eventually, empirical results suggest that there is a positive association between the growth rate of youth unemployment and the...

We introduce a simple growth model to investigate how the evolution of a society is influenced by international conflicts. We come to the result that in the long run three equilibria are possible; a war equilibrium, a peace equilibrium or cycles between war and peace. Which kind of equilibrium...

This paper tests Huntington’s the Clash of Civilizations hypothesis evaluating the impact of civilizations on militarized interstate disputes. In particular, we investigate whether countries that belong to different civilizations tend to be more involved in conflict than countries that belong...

Do the citizens have a role in constraining policies in autocratic governments? Usually the political and economic literature model autocracy as if the citizens have no role in constraining leader’s behavior, but actually autocratic government are afraid of possible citizens’ revolts. In...

In post-colonial Africa many rulers relied on so called ‘divide-and-rule’ politics to survive in office. The concept of divide-and-rule describes a strategy for rulers to sustain power by exploiting coordination problems among potential rivals. Rulers can break up rival concentrations of...

We analyze socioeconomic differences in adult mortality in four African countries-the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone-using the adult mortality module in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), calculating mortality based on the sibling mortality reports...

The purpose of this paper is to apply economic analysis to the opportunities and choices of single individual ‘lone wolf’ terrorists whose attacks are characterised by ‘sprees’ of violence, usually shooting sprees in public places, that last only for a relatively short period of time....

This article illustrates how fine continuous and categorical measures of genocide intensity can be derived from the records of the Rwandan transitional justice system. The data, which include the number of genocide suspects and genocide survivors across 1484 administrative sectors, are highly...

This paper uses an events data set for the post-Cold War era to measure the impact of trade interdependence on three different types of dyadic interactions: political, military, and economic. The paper extends the literature on trade and peace by estimating a model in which trade and interstate...