In “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate,“ Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor analyze the causal effects of terrorist attacks on the political preferences of the Israeli electorate. In this comment, I discuss Berrebi and Klor's empirical approach -...

Do Kenyans vote according to ethnic identities or policy interests? Based on results from a national probability sample survey conducted in the first week of December 2007, this article shows that, while ethnic origins drive voting patterns, elections in Kenya amount to more than a mere ethnic...

We examine how group-specific differences in reservation wage, arising due to asymmetries in social entitlements, impact on distribution via the joint determination of class conflict between workers and employers, and ‘ethnic’ conflict among workers. We model a two-dimensional contest, where...

There are two factions in a conflict. A third-party may choose to intervene by supporting one of the factions. We consider a third-party who maximizes a weighted sum of the welfare of the warring factions and the non-combatant population. In the case of a nonmilitary intervention, we obtain the...

I consider a two-stage (dynamic) elimination contest with uninformed and informed players. Informed players can signal their type to future uninformed opponents through their efforts in the first stage. Uninformed players might make wrong inferences. It is in this sense that they are boundedly...

This paper starts from the observation that despite their very high levels of unemployment, major European countries have devoted few resources to reducing it. This suggests that there is little political concern about high unemployment. I develop a model where the government tries to increase...

Leaders compensate supporters not just for performing their duties but also in order to preempt an overthrow by the same supporters. We show how succession rules affect the power of leaders relative to supporters as well as the resources expended on possible succession struggles. We compare two...

We consider Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanisms for resolving conflicts between two agents who are uncertain about each other's fighting potential. We model the default option of outright conflict as a probabilistic contest. Examples of such contests may be...

This paper views Islamist radicals as self-interested political revolutionaries and builds on a general model of political extremism developed in a previous paper (Ferrero, 2002), where extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then...

Mondialisation, globalisation, internationalisation autant de concepts qui ont leur signification propre, même si la frontière de démarcation est souvent floue. Le propos ne sera pas d'en faire l'exégèse ni d'en préciser le contenu mais de considérer, au départ, le phénomène...