The spending obligations and revenue sources of colonial New Jersey's provincial government for the years 1704 through 1775 are reconstituted using forensic accounting techniques from primary sources. Such has not been done previously for any British North American colony. These data are used to...

This paper reviews the economics approach to conflict and national borders. The paper provides a summary of ideas and concepts from the economics literature on the size of nations; illustrates them within an analytical framework where populations engage in conflict over borders and resources,...

According to our analysis, pre-invasion views about the likely course of the Iraq intervention imply present value costs for the United States in the range of $100 to $870 billion. Our estimated present value cost for the containment policy is nearly $300 billion and ranges upward to $700...

Why do sovereign states sometimes fail to settle territorial disputes peacefully? Also, why do even peaceful settlements of territorial disputes rarely call for the resulting border to be unfortified? This paper explores a class of answers to these questions that is based on the following...

Although most disputes between groups of people are settled peacefully, sometimes disputes result in war. This lecture uses historical examples to illustrate how the ability to negotiate a credible peaceful settlement of a dispute between sovereign states, typically a dispute over the control of...

The central claim of a rapidly growing literature in international relations is that members of pairs of democratic states are much less likely to engage each other in war or in serious disputes short of war than are members of other pairs of states. Our analysis does not support this claim....

This study examines the long-term effects of prenatal exposure to war violence on cognitive and developmental outcomes, focusing on children in Afghanistan, a country deeply affected by prolonged violent conflict. Using data from the 2022 Afghanistan Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and...

We re-examine the determinants of current account balances (CAB) and the saving-investment nexus with focus on emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). We are in a new age in terms of facing not just economic challenges but also other non-economic challenges such as global climate...

We use response curves in a repeated game to analyze key aspects of mutual deterrence: escalation, de-escalation, incomplete deterrence, and deterrence by denial. In this approach, episodes of violence are due to interacting response curves, which disincentivize opponents from attacking through...

This paper develops an explanation for historical differences in the ways in which territorial disputes between sovereign states have been resolved. The main innovation in the analysis is to allow for three possible equilibria: ú an unfortified border; ú a fortified but peaceful border; and ú...