This paper investigates the impact of patronage and ideology on voter behavior and election outcomes. Egypt's first free presidential elections represent a good case study to answer the question whether private gain outweighs ideology in voter behavior on a broader level. First, we combine...

This paper presents a theory of endogenous economic institutions in non-democracies, where political accountability is enforced through the threat of revolution. We consider a dynamic game between an elite ruling class and a disenfranchised working class, in which workers have imperfect...

This paper presents a laboratory experiment to investigate how social motivations and free-form communication (Rich Communication) can facilitate coordinated resistance against divide-and-conquer transgressions. In our experiment, a leader first decides whether to extract surplus from a victim...

This paper explores the effect of conflict on GDP in Northern Ireland. A synthetic control region constructed as a weighted average of other UK regions provides an estimate of counterfactual ‘no-conflict’ GDP. Comparing this with actual per capita GDP suggests a negative impact of up to 10%....

Since 1995, growth in sub-Saharan Africa has averaged more than 5% per year reversing a two-decade decline of real income per capita. In this paper, we explore the extent to which the nascent growth is sustainable or not due to higher incidences of terrorism and commodity price declines. Our...

Are natural resources a source of conflict or stability? Empirical studies demonstrate that rents from natural resources, and in particular oil, are an important source of civil war. Allegedly, resource rents attract rent-seekers, which destabilize society. However, there is a large literature...

In this paper I integrate elements from the bankruptcy literature in a resource contest model. In a contest model, agents fight over a contested resource and their investment in 'guns' determines how much of the resource is secured by each agent. In a bankruptcy problem, agents claim a share of...

The main objective of this paper is to empirically investigate the socio-economic causes of terrorism and political violence in a sample of 12 countries in Western Europe. First, we show that in western European countries the classical economic argument of opportunity cost is confirmed. That is,...

This paper has multiple objectives. I set out linkages of a causal model to portray how globalization influences international terrorist strategies. I also point to methodological and theoretical shortcomings in the literature with respect to the levels of disaggregation at which issues are...

Prior research has concluded that socio-economic development does not significantly affect terrorism. We take an alternative view. First, we note that a country's socio-economic circumstances affect terrorists' behavior through terrorism's opportunity costs. We argue that this reasoning also...