Civil wars tend to cluster in particular areas of the world. We provide empirical evidence that cross-border conflict spillovers are an important factor in explaining this pattern. Moreover, we show that ethnicity plays a key role in conditioning the spread of civil wars. Only ethnic wars tend...

This paper considers the impact of foreign aid flows on the risk of civil conflict. We improve on earlier studies on this topic by addressing the problem of the endogenous aid allocation using GDP levels of donor countries as instruments. A more structural addition to the literature is that we...