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

I critically review recent studies that estimate those costs of violence and conflict that can emerge among organized political groupings, from states, religious and ethnic organizations to guerillas and paramilitaries. The review includes studies that estimate direct and indirect costs due to...

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...

Wars of conquest and wars of independence are characterized by an asymmetric payoff structure: one party gets aggregate production if it wins, and its own production if it loses, while the other party gets only its own production if it wins, and nothing if it loses. We study a model of war with...

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...

We provide evidence indicating that countries with well-developed social security systems do not necessarily face a trade-off between social spending and competitiveness. On average, countries that spend a lot on social needs score well in the competitiveness league. We investigate the...

We augment the canonical neoclassical model of trade to allow for interstate disputes over land, oil, water, or other resources. The costs of such disputes in terms of arming depend on the trade regime in place. Under either autarky or free trade, the larger country (in terms of factor...

We analyze how trade openness matters for interstate conflict over productive resources. Our analysis features a terms-of-trade channel that makes security policies trade-regime dependent. Specifically, trade between two adversaries reduces each one's incentive to arm given the opponent's...

Typically, economics assumes that property rights over productive resources or goods are perfectly defined and costlessly enforced. The costs of insecurity and the resultant conflict are, however, real and often economically significant. In this paper, we examine how international trade regimes...