We investigate the prevalence and determinants of ethnic favoritism, i.e., preferential public policies targeted at the political leader’s ethnic group. We construct a panel dataset of 2,022 ethnographic regions from 139 countries with annual observations from 1992 to 2012, and use nighttime...

In this paper, I ask whether there is a relationship between land property rights and international migration. In order to identify the impact of property rights, I consider a country-wide land certification program that took place in Mexico in the 1990s. My identification strategy exploits the...

We develop a conflict model linking dissipation to the distribution of the population over an arbitrary number of groups. We extend the pure contest version of the model by Esteban and Ray (1999) to include a mixed public-private good. We analyze how the level of dissipation changes as the...

This paper has two objectives: First, to develop and critically examine various measures of ethnic cleansing on the basis of a review of the existing literature. Second, to apply the suggested measures to a unique sample of 530 villages in Southwestern Darfur. Our data shows that 57 percent of...

In this paper we ask whether there is a relationship between property rights and international migration. In order to identify the impact of property rights, we consider a country-wide land certification program, which took place in Mexico throughout the 1990s, and complemented the 1992 Agrarian...

This paper investigates the impact of implicit institutions on the decision to become an entrepreneur. Implicit institutions are here defined as mindsets that have developed as the result of norms and traditions and we expect they will have an influence on risk attitudes and opportunity...

The United States have them, European countries long for them, and universities are supposed to provide them—entrepreneurs are ubiquitously wanted because of their supposed impact on innovation and economic growth. The underlying mechanism is developed in Schumpeter’s (1912)...

This paper analyses the effect of information disseminated by the Internet on voting behavior. We address endogeneity in Internet availability by exploiting regional and technological peculiarities of the preexisting voice telephony network that hinder the roll-out of fixed-line broadband...

We provide empirical evidence that the experience of a socialist regime leads to a lack of self-reliance by comparing East and West Germans conditional on regional differences in current economic development. This meaningful lack of self-reliance persists after the regime’s breakdown and...