The nineteenth century was a time of substantial changes in the patterns of economic growth. This was also a period of significant fluctuations in the structure of and allocation of political rights. Through successive franchise extensions, democracy expanded dramatically, giving birth to the...

We study how conflict in a contest game is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our main motivation stems from the analysis of socio-political conflict. The relevant theoretical prediction in our setting is that conflict expenditures are...

We extend the model of collective action in which groups compete for a budged by endogenizing the group platform, namely the specific mixture of public/private good and the distribution of the private good to group members which can be uniform or performance-based. While the group-optimal...

We study the process by which subordinated regions of a country can obtain a more favourable political status. In our theoretical model a dominant and a dominated region first interact through a voting process that can lead to different degrees of autonomy. If this process fails then both...

We analyze a model of conflict with endogenous choice of effort, where subsets of the contenders may force the resolution to be sequential: First the alliance fights it out with the rest and in case they win later they fight it out among themselves. For three-player games, we find that it will...

Can infrastructure investment win "hearts and minds"? We analyze a famous case in the early stages of dictatorship – the building of the motorway network in Nazi Germany. The Autobahn was one of the most important projects of the Hitler government. It was intended to reduce unemployment, and...

Social capital – a dense network of associations facilitating cooperation within a community – typically leads to positive political and economic outcomes, as demonstrated by a large literature following Putnam. A growing literature emphasizes the potentially "dark side" of social capital....

Alan S. Milward was an economic historian who developed an implicit theory of historical change. His interpretation which was neither liberal nor Marxist posited that social, political, and economic change, for it to be sustainable, had to be a gradual process rather than one resulting from a...

This paper estimates the effect of piracy attacks on shipping costs using a unique data set on shipping contracts in the dry bulk market. We look at shipping routes whose shortest path exposes them to piracy attacks and find that the increase in attacks in 2008 lead to around a ten percent...

During the Greek debt crisis after 2010, the German government insisted on harsh austerity measures. This led to a rapid cooling of relations between the Greek and German governments. We compile a new index of public acrimony between Germany and Greece based on newspaper reports and internet...