Why do wars occur? We exploit a natural experiment to test the longstanding hypothesis that leaders declare war because they fail to internalize the associated costs. We test this moral hazard theory of conflict by compiling data on the 9,210 children of 3,693 US legislators who served in the...

Why do wars occur? We exploit a natural experiment to test the longstanding hypothesis that leaders declare war because they fail to internalize the associated costs. We test this moral hazard theory of conflict by compiling data on 9,210 children of 3,693 U.S. legislators who served in Congress...

Charles A. Beard ([1913] 2004) argued that the U.S. Constitution was created to advance the personalty interests of many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Because delegate votes on individual clauses at the Constitutional Convention were not publicly recorded, prior empirical...