This paper presents an analytic narrative of three decades of oil and violence in Nigeria, assuming rational choice by all the actors. It argues that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the government had to choose between spending money on preventing pollution and terrorizing the population away from the...

A positive relation between wheat production and the level of the agricultural minimum wage in Morocco is explained by applying a version of Stigler's (1946) monopsony model. The resulting econometric equation passes a large number of tests on Moroccan data over 1971-89. A model of the...

A simple framework is set up to discuss the relationship between democracy, material welfare, and development. Democracy is regarded both as a good in its own right and as an input in the production of material welfare. The optimum level of democracy is then related to the level of development....

This paper analyzes a simple game-theoretic model to highlight the choice of the government between raising its defense expenditures or giving away some 'gifts' to his opponents as a means to defend his position in power. If the government is a Cournot-Nash player, then there is no gift in...

In this contract-theoretic model the government promises a transfer to its potential opponent in return for not engaging in a civil war. Two causes of civil war are identified: (i) imperfect credibility increases the cost of the required transfer, and may make it unfeasible; (ii) asymmetric...