Although the relationship between natural resources and civil war has received much attention, little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Controversies and contradictions in the stylized facts persist because resource extraction is treated as exogenous while in reality fighting affects...

This paper studies the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agriculture. To do so, gravity models are estimated using data on bilateral investment relationships, together with newly constructed indicators of agro-ecological suitability in areas with low population density as...

This paper adopts an instrumental variable approach to uncover the impact of variations in minimum temperature on emergence and severity of actual violence through the effect on food availability, captured by rice crops per capita. The link between increase in minimum temperature and rice crops...

We analyze the influence of IMF and World Bank programs on political regime transitions. We develop an extended version of Acemoglu and Robinson’s [American Economic Review 91, 2001] model of political transitions to show how the anticipation of new loans from in-ternational financial...

We augment the canonical neoclassical model of trade to allow for interstate disputes over land, oil, water, or other resources. The costs of such disputes in terms of arming depend on the trade regime in place. Under either autarky or free trade, the larger country (in terms of factor...

We investigate situations in which players make costly contributions as group members in a group conflict, and at the same time engage in contest with fellow group members to appropriate the possible reward. We introduce within group power asymmetry and complementarity in members’ efforts, and...

Group-based identity undermines democracy by impeding democratic change of government. A substantial literature has therefore studied how to make democracy consistent with group identity. We contribute to this literature by introducing the role of group decisiveness into voting incentives and...

In this paper, we generalize the General Lotto game and the Colonel Blotto game to allow for battlefield valuations that are heterogeneous across battlefields and asymmetric across players, and for the players to have asymmetric resource constraints. We completely characterize Nash equilibrium...

This contribution examines the role of capitalism in anti-American terrorism. Using data for 149 countries between 1970 and 2007, this contribution, contrary to expectations from capitalist peace theory, does not find that Anti-American terrorism increases with external economic liberalization...

This paper evaluates direct and structural discrimination as a means of increasing efforts in the most widely studied contests. We establish that a designer who maximizes efforts subject to a balanced-budget constraint prefers dual discrimination, namely, change of the contestants’ prize...