Existing research has pointed to the decreasing effect of revolutions and wars on income inequality. It is unclear whether this reduction is the result of ongoing changes within countries before revolutions and wars or if the results are standalone effects. In this study, we focus on the case of...

This paper studies how an increase in the number of armed groups operating within an area affects the amount of organized political violence. We use plausible exogenous variation in the number of armed groups in Pakistan, by exploiting the split of a major group due to the natural death of its...

This paper develops a theoretical framework that makes predictions on (a) the conditions under which a populist party decides to run and the policy position it takes and (b) voters' response under different electoral systems. We test these predictions using data on Italian municipal elections...

We examine whether changes of government influence compliance with international agreements. We investigate compliance with the NATO two percent target to which all NATO countries committed themselves during the NATO summit in Wales in 2014. The dataset includes the military expenditure by NATO...

This study examines the effect of religiosity on terrorism by focusing on one of the five pillars of Islam: Ramadan fasting. For identification, we exploit two facts: First, daily fasting from dawn to sunset during Ramadan is considered mandatory for most Muslims. Second, the Islamic calendar is...

The paper asks whether the exercising of the NATO membership option is justified for Finland and Sweden in the light of their geopolitical state after Russia's attack on Ukraine. It was the Gallup democracy, which launched the political moves towards the membership. In both countries, the...

This study examines the causal effect of the violent "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests in Iran during the last quarter of 2022 on individual life satisfaction. To evaluate the impact, we use two original representative surveys in Iran conducted in 2022. Our results, based on an ordered logit...

We are the first to analyze the effect of terror on stock markets by terror ideology. Surprisingly, we find that Islamist terror attacks created significant negative abnormal returns in American and European markets, but the stock market effects of other terror attacks were almost nil. For our...

Can religiosity sway a society's propensity for violence against outgroups? We first introduce two state-year-level religiosity measures for several pre-Enlightenment European states with the frequencies of (i) religious language in book publications and (ii) Christian names of newborns. To...

This study examines the causal joint effect of a new political regime and war against Iraq on life expectancy of Iranians for the period 1978–1988 during the revolution and war. I use a synthetic control approach to construct a synthetic Iran based on a weighted average of other Middle East...