Free media may not favor political accountability when other democratic institutions are weak, and may even bring undesirable unintended consequences. We propose a simple model in which politicians running for office may engage in coercion to obtain votes. A media scandal that exposes these...

This paper examines the role of mass media in countering special interest group influence. I use the concentration of campaign contributions from Political Action Committees to proxy special interests´ capture US Senate candidates from 1980 to 2002, and compare the reaction of voters to...

Access to more information by a group of voters may represent more knowledge about the political system and incentivize people to make better choices. In this paper I argue that mass media have an impact over voters' knowledge, reflected on one of the main forms of political participation that...

El desplazamiento de población es un fenómeno frecuente en los países inmersos en conflictos internos. El desplazamiento forzoso, además de afectar directamente a la población desplazada, contribuye a deteriorar las condiciones laborales de la población vulnerable en las comunidades...

This paper theoretically assesses the role that uncertainty plays in the intensity of conflicts. The standard two-player rent-seeking contest model (Tullock, 1980) is extended to allow for privately known subjective values of the prize. The conflict is modeled as a Bayesian game on which each...

Civilian displacement is a common phenomenon in developing countries confrontedwith internal conflict. While displacement directly affects forced migrants, it also contributes to deteriorating labor conditions of vulnerable groups in receiving communities. For the displaced population, the...

In this paper, we study how between-group wealth and size heterogeneity affectsuccess probabilities as well as aggregate rent-seeking efforts when two groups compete for the allocation of a pure public good. Unlike with previous models, we measure the utility cost of rent-seeking in terms of the...

Este trabajo analiza los efectos de largo plazo de la reforma agraria entendida como la asignación de tierras baldías sobre el desplazamiento forzado, el abandono y despojo de tierras, en un contexto concentración del poder político y aumentos en los retornos de la tierra. A partir de un...

We model the war on drugs in source countries as a conflict over scarce inputs of successive levels of the production and trafficking chain. We explicitly model the vertical structure of the drug trade as being composed of several stages, and study how different policies aimed at different...

El objetivo de este artículo es investigar la relación entre el conflicto armado y la producción agropecuaria de los pequeños productores colombianos. El efecto de la violencia se desagrega entre los impactos directos (choques violentos) e indirectos (presencia de grupos armados). Las...