to levels of trust or social polarization, I find it is negatively associated with the adoption of new technologies and …

, and construct measures of polarization and fractionalization based on the cardinals’ places of birth. The deaths of popes … standard deviation in our measure of polarization raised the likelihood of internal conflict by between 2 and 3 percent in a …We study the effect of divisions within the elite on the probability of internal conflict in the Papal States between …

This chapter introduces the author’s selected papers on the economics of coercion and conflict. It defines coercion and … conflict and relates them. In conflict, adversaries make costly investments in the means of coercion. The application of … coercion does not remove choice but limits it to options that leave the victim worse off than before. Coercion and conflict are …

Surprisingly high levels of within-group cooperation are observed in conflict situations. Ex- periments confirm that …

before colonization, we show that apart from the land mass and water area of an ethnicity’s historical homeland, no other … geographic, economic, and historical trait, including proxies of pre-colonial conflict, predicts partitioning by the national … borders. Second, we exploit a detailed geo-referenced database that records various types of conflict across African regions …

This paper studies the conditions under which intra-elite conflict leads to a democracy. There are two risk averse …

This study explores the consequences and origins of between-ethnicity economic inequality both across and within …