Social scientists and policy makers have long been interested in the causes and consequences of peace and conflict. This handbook brings together contributions from leading scholars who take an economic perspective to study the topic. It includes thirty-three chapters and is divided into five...

In this paper, we explore two factors that can limit arming and, more generally, the costs of enforcement within and across states: governance or the formal organizations and institutions that help define and enforce property rights, and norms, or the informal arrangements in settling potential...

We construct a model of conflict and trade to study the consequences of interstate disputes over contested resources (land, oil, water or other resources) for arming, welfare and trade flows. Different trade regimes imply different costs of such disputes in terms of arming. Depending on world...

In this chapter, we examine how some of the main results in international trade theory fare when we abandon the traditional assumption of third-party enforcement of property rights. Without such enforcement, countries arm and exercise power to secure resources used in production or to secure the...

Conflict and war are typically viewed as the outcome of misperceptions, incomplete information, or even irrationality. The authors show that it can be otherwise. Despite the short-run incentives to settle disputes peacefully, there can be long-term, compounding rewards to going to war when doing...

We construct a model of conflict and trade to study the consequences of interstate disputes over contested resources (land, oil, water or other resources) for arming, welfare and trade flows. Different trade regimes imply different costs of such disputes in terms of arming. Depending on world...

In this paper, we explore two factors that can limit arming and, more generally, the costs of enforcement within and across states: governance or the formal organizations and institutions that help define and enforce property rights, and norms, or the informal arrangements in settling potential...

We examine how globalization affects trade patterns and welfare when conflict prevails domestically. We do so in a simple model of trade, in which a natural resource like oil is contested by competing groups using real resources (?guns?). Thus, conflict is viewed as ultimately stemming from...

We augment the canonical neoclassical model of trade to allow for interstate disputes over land, oil, water, or other resources. The costs of such disputes in terms of arming depend on the trade regime in place. Under either autarky or free trade, the larger country (in terms of factor...

We examine how globalization affects trade patterns and welfare when conflict prevails domestically. We do so in a simple model of trade, in which a natural resource like oil is contested by competing groups using real resources ("guns"). Thus, conflict is viewed as ultimately stemming from...