When considering engaging in conflict to secure control of a resource, a group needs to predict the amount of post-conflict leakage due to infiltration by members of losing groups. We use this insight to explain why conflict often takes place along ethnic lines, why some ethnic groups are more...

In this paper we present a citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with endogenous lobbying. We find that lobbying induces policy compromise and always affects equilibrium policy outcomes. In particular, even though the policy preferences of lobbies are relatively extreme, lobbying...

What policies and institutions are needed to sustain long-run growth in the UK? We describe an optimistic story of the UK economy over the past 30 years. From the late 1970s, the UK reversed a century of relative decline in terms of per capita GDP with our main counterparts in the US, France and...

Research on HIV infection and sexual behaviour in sub-Saharan Africa typically focuses on individuals aged 15–49 years, under the assumption that both become less relevant for older individuals. We test this assumption using data from rural Malawi to compare sexual behaviour and HIV infection...

We assess risk factors affecting the severity and dynamics of civil wars, departing from analyses focused primarily on static models of the effect of income on the extensive margin of conflict. Civil conflicts are shown to be persistent, but rarely do they become more severe in response to past...

This paper rethinks audit regimes from the shadow-land of outsourcing in India. This is the arena of informalized work environments that are connected to global value chains and the revenue streams of an extractive liberalization state focused on public debt repayment. Based on ethnography of...

We find an economic rationale for the common sense answer to the question in our title — courts should not always enforce what the contracting parties write. We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court. An active court can improve on the outcome...

We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court. The model we analyze is the same as in Anderlini, Felli, and Postlewaite (2006). An active court can improve on the outcome that the parties would achieve without it. The institutional role of the court is...

We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex-ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex-post the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred, and decides...