This paper examines the dynamics of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the Second Intifada. Using data on the daily number of fatalities between September 2000 and January 2005, we estimate reaction functions for both Israelis and Palestinians and find evidence of Granger...

We propose a model of cycles of conflict and distrust. Overlapping generations of agents from two groups sequentially play coordination games under incomplete information about whether the other side consists of bad types who always take bad actions. Good actions may be misperceived as bad and...

A classical theme in social analysis views economic class divisions as the main cause of social conflict. Yet many, if not most of the conflicts we observe today appear to be ethnic in nature. It appears that the "vertical" nature of class divisions is often dominated by the "horizontal"...

If workers self-select into industries based upon their relative productivity in different tasks, and comparative advantage is aligned with absolute advantage, then the average efficacy of a sector's workforce will be negatively correlated with its employment share. This might explain the...

We use rich historical data on military procurement to estimate the effects of government spending. We exploit regional variation in military build-ups to estimate an "open economy relative multiplier" of approximately 1.5. We develop a framework for interpreting this estimate and relating it to...