For the past 70 years, there has been a downward trend in the size of wars, but the idea of an enduring "long peace" remains controversial. Some recent contributions suggest that observed war patterns,including the long peace, could have come from a long-standing and unchanging war-generating...

It is still unknown whether there is some deep structure to modern wars and terrorist campaigns that could allow reliable prediction of future patterns of violent events. Recent war research focuses on size distributions of violent events, with size defined by the number of people killed in each...

We are able to unify various disparate claims and results in the literature, that stand in the way of a unified description and understanding of human conflict. First, we provide a reconciliation of the numerically different power-law exponent values for fatality distributions across entire wars...

For the past 70 years, there has been a downward trend in the size of wars, but the idea of an enduring "long peace" remains controversial. Some recent contributions suggest that observed war patterns,including the long peace, could have come from a long-standing and unchanging war-generating...

It is still unknown whether there is some deep structure to modern wars and terrorist campaigns that could allow reliable prediction of future patterns of violent events. Recent war research focuses on size distributions of violent events, with size defined by the number of people killed in each...

We model growth in dictatorships facing each period an endogenous probability of "political catastrophe" that would extinguish the regime's wealth extraction ability. Domestic capital exhibits a bifurcation point determining economic growth or shrinkage. With low initial domestic capital the...

Transition economies have an initial condition of high human capital relative to living standards. I explore the possible implications of this key fact by surveying and adapting literature on growth and inequality. I focus especially on the long run and policy options

Cluster sampling has recently been used to estimate the mortality in various conflicts around the world. The Burnham et al. (2006) study on Iraq employs a new variant of this cluster sampling methodology. The stated methodology of Burnham et al. (2006) is to (1) select a random main street, (2)...

We model growth in dictatorships facing each period an endogenous probability of ``political catastrophe'' that would extinguish the regime's wealth extraction ability. Domestic capital exhibits a bifurcation point determining economic growth or shrinkage. With low initial domestic capital the...