States, in their conflicts with militant groups embedded in civilian populations, often resort to policies of collective punishment to erode civilian support for the militants. We attempt to evaluate the efficacy of such policies in the context of the Gaza Strip, where Israel's blockade and...

This paper examines the impact of terrorism on voting behavior in the United States. We rely on an exhaustive list of terror attacks over the period 1970-2016 and exploit the inherent randomness of the success or failure of terror attacks to identify the political impacts of terrorism. We first...

We model political contestation over school language policy, within linguistic communities where weak property rights protection leads to high decentralized expropriation. We show that improvements in governance institutions that facilitate property rights protection might exacerbate such...

We model a contest between two groups of equal population size over the division of a group-specific public good. Each group is fragmented into sub-groups. Each sub-group allocates effort between production and contestation. There is perfect coordination within sub-groups, but sub-groups cannot...

This paper provides causal evidence on the importance of socioeconomic circumstances, socialization, and childhood events, in the formation of adult political behaviour and attitudes, using region-by-cohort variation in exposure to the Jewish expulsions in Nazi Germany as a quasi-experiment. We...

Terror has become a global issue. Terror acts perpetuated by religious, nationalist or political groups around the globe can propagate distress rapidly through different channels and possibly change political attitudes. This paper suggests the first evaluation of the impact of global terror on...

We study communication in committees selecting one of two alternatives when consensus is required and agents have private information about their preferences. Delaying the decision is costly, so a form of multiplayer war of attrition emerges. Waiting allows voters to express the intensity of...

How do staying minorities that evade ethnic cleansing integrate into re-settled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, but some were allowed to stay, many of them left-leaning anti-fascists. We study quasi-experimental...

We investigate the impact of community power on the practice of untouchability in rural India. We model two-dimensional simultaneous group conflict over social norms, wherein an upper and backward (OBC) caste Hindu bloc contests the 'scheduled' castes (SCs) over the extent to which behavioural...

We study the effect of ethnic diversity on local public spending following fiscal decentralisation in a setting where local institutions are salient. Specifically, the latter affects coordination costs and thereby cooperative behaviour across the constituent ethnic groups. Our theory highlights...