This paper provides a bargaining model of conflict in which the government offers a transfer to an opposition group to avoid civil war. Members of the opposition are heterogeneous in income and ideology, and heterogeneity generates disagreement about whether to accept the government's offer. We...

This article proposes a reading of the armed conflict from an evolutionary design that takes into account the concept of private protection agencies in the works of Schelling / Nozick / Gambetta. Their aim is to assess the dynamics of conflict and changes from its author's scientific output. A...

From 1865 to 1870, a crisis atmosphere hovered around the issue of the massive public debt created during the recently concluded Civil War, leading, in part, to the passage of a Constitutional Amendment ensuring the “validity of the public debt.” However, the Civil War debt crisis was not a...

This paper argues that natural resources in the past have been falsely identified as a cause of civil conflict onset. The idea that natural resources spur conflict has reached a certain degree of acceptance among scholars and policy makers with a number of quantitative studies concluding that...

We use new data to examine the effects of giant oilfield discoveries around the world since 1946. On average, these discoveries increase per capita oil production and oil exports by up to 50 percent. But these giant oilfield discoveries also have a dark side: they increase the incidence of...

This paper reviews how the Spanish civil war was financed. We present new evidence to show that the two combatant parties, the Republican government and the Franco administration followed similar financial strategies. In both cases money creation, rather than new taxes or the issue of debt, was...

This Paper establishes and explores the implications of a somewhat surprising empirical finding. Although civil war adversely affects the performance of social indicators in general, poorer countries lose less, in absolute and relative terms, than richer countries. It is argued that the...

Natural and agricultural resources for which there is a substantial black market, such as coca, opium, and diamonds, appear especially likely to be exploited by the parties to a civil conflict. On the other hand, these resources may also provide one of the few reliable sources of income in the...

This paper analyzes empirically the relationship between civil wars and international trade. We first show that trade destruction due to civil wars is very large and persistent and increases with the severity of the conflict. We then test the presence of two effects that trade can have on the...

This Paper studies the relationship between civil war and private investment in a poor, resource abundant country using microeconomic data for Angola. We focus on diamond mining firms and conduct an event study on the sudden end of the conflict, marked by the death of the rebel movement leader...