This paper develops a quantitative model of trade, military conflicts, and defense spending. Trade liberalization between two countries reduces probability of an armed conflict between them, causing both to cut defense spending. This in turn causes a domino effect on defense spending by other...

Victorious alliances often fight about the spoils of war. This paper presents an experiment on the determinants of whether alliances break up and fight internally after having defeated a joint enemy. First, if peaceful sharing yields an asymmetric rent distribution, this increases the likelihood...

This paper considers evolutionarily stable decisions about whether to initiate violent conflict rather than accepting a peaceful sharing outcome. Focusing on small sets of players such as countries in a geographically confined area, we use Schaffer's (1988) concept of evolutionary stability. We...

This paper theoretically assesses the role that uncertainty plays in the intensity of conflicts. The standard two-player rent-seeking contest model (Tullock, 1980) is extended to allow for privately known subjective values of the prize. The conflict is modeled as a Bayesian game on which each...

We explore the role of unfairly resolved land conflicts on the long-run dynamics of Colombia's war. We claimed that inadequately or unfairly resolved land conflicts can explain not only the emergence of rebel groups but also their repertoires and targets of violence—notably forced...

Do agricultural producers forgo otherwise profitable investments due to civil conflict? Answering this question is crucial to our understanding of the costs of violence, but requires the ability to measure farmers’ willingness to invest and access to exogenous variation in conflict intensity....

This paper studies the effect of internal conflict on local fiscal capacity using evidence from Colombia’s political conflict in the mid-20th century, better known as La Violencia. Following a difference-in-differences strategy, I find that internal conflict has negative long-term consequences...

Previous work has documented a negative correlation between internal conflict and state capacity. We attempt to shed light on mechanisms that underlie this relationship, using data for Colombian municipalities. We rely on identifying heterogeneous effects of different types of violent events on...

I study the causal effect of the foreign aid for development assistance —implemented by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)— on the intensity of municipality-level armed conflict in Colombia, for the period 2009-2013. To address potential endogeneity biases, I use a...

In many situations there is a potential for conflict both within and between groups. Examples include wars and civil wars and distributional conflict in multitiered organizations like federal states or big companies. This paper models such situations with a logistic technology of conflict. If...