A new dataset by Bazzi and Blattman (2014) allows examining the effects of international commodity prices on the risk of civil war outbreak with more comprehensive data. I find that international commodity price downturns sparked civil wars in Sub-Saharan Africa. Another finding with the new...

This paper proposes a simple framework to better understand an opposition group's choice between peace, terrorism, and open civil conflict against the government. Our model implies that terrorism emerges if constraints on the ruling executive group are intermediate and rents are sizeable,...

This paper suggests that societies exhibiting a large degree of educational polarization among its populace are systematically more likely to slip into civil conflict and civil war. Intuitively, political preferences and beliefs of highly educated citizens are likely to differ fundamentally from...

Although the relationship between natural resources and civil war has received much attention, little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Controversies and contradictions in the stylized facts persist because resource extraction is treated as exogenous while in reality fighting affects...

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...

Using a panel fixed effects model for a sample of 121 countries covering 1975‐2005, we examine how financial development, financial liberalization and banking crises are related to income inequality. In contrast with most previous work, our results suggest that all finance variables increase...

Brain drain is a core economic policy problem for many developing countries today. Does relative inequality in source and destination countries influence the brain-drain phenomenon? We explore human capital selectivity during the period 1820-1909.We apply age heaping techniques to measure human...

We develop a model of international trade between two symmetric countries that features inter-group inequality between entrepreneurs and workers, and also intra-group inequality within each of those two groups. Individuals in the economy are heterogeneous with respect to their entrepreneurial...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

Within the fundamental determinants of cross-country income inequality, ‘humanly devised' political institutions represent a hallmark factor that societies can influence, as opposed to, for example, geography. Focusing on the portion of inequality explainable by differences in political...