This Paper establishes and explores the implications of a somewhat surprising empirical finding. Although civil war … abundance of public goods such as physical infrastructure. Civil war destroys public goods, and therefore damages … not of course be read as implying that poorer countries need less support to avoid civil war and to cope with its …

This Paper studies the relationship between civil war and private investment in a poor, resource abundant country using …

time, transmitting them to the next generation. The theory bears a set of testable predictions. First, war is a stochastic … breakdown of trust, plunging a society into a vicious cycle of recurrent conflicts (a war trap). The incidence of conflict can …

. Also, they are context dependent. Ethnicity in particular plays a key role in the spread of civil war. Only ethnic civil … countries are more or less susceptible to spillovers. Ethnic links to a neighbor at ethnic civil war increase the probability of … an outbreak of ethnic civil war at home by 6 percentage points. …

cost theories of war. …

on the likelihood of civil war? Our approach to answering these questions exploits that international commodity prices … war more likely in non-democracies. This effect is significantly weaker in democracies. So much so, that we do not find a … link between growth and civil war in countries with democratic institutions. Our results therefore point to an interaction …