This paper examines the consequences of a government mimicking the policy of its competitor by studying the introduction of the welfare state in 19th century Germany. The reform conducted by the conservative government targeted blue-collar workers and aimed to reduce the success of the socialist...

In models of non-deterministic contest, players exert irreversible effort in order to increase their probability of winning a prize. The most prominent functional form of the win probability in the literature is the so-called logit" contest success function. We provide a simple micro-foundation...

One of the primary objectives of protests and demonstrations is to bring social, political, or economic issues to the attention of politicians and the wider population. While protests can have a mobilizing and persuading effect, they may reduce support for their cause if they are perceived as a...

Proxy wars are a key pattern of political conflict and interstate competition. Rather than resorting to direct conflicts, which are costly and entail a higher level of uncertainty, governments may opt for proxy wars, which may last longer, but are less costly and render them more immune to...

Laboratory evidence shows that when people have to argue for a given position, they persuade themselves about the position's factual and moral superiority. Such self-persuasion limits the potential of communication to resolve conflict and reduce polarization. We test for this phenomenon in a...

Promise competition is prevalent in many economic environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. We study the value of transparency for promise competition and ask whether promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations when outcomes do not allow for observing...

Over the last decade, the defense industry has obtained relevance on Brazilian public policies. Departing from the premise that the success of this process requires not only that the Armed Forces have modern equipment and skilled military to operate them, but also that the country retains the...

In order to prepare and employ naval power and contribute to national defense, the Brazilian Navy, through its programs and projects, seeks to develop means of implementation of naval war operations and actions suitable for its main tasks - sea denial and control, and power projection. A...

The paper aims at a conceptual contribution to the normative economic analysis of rural de-velopment (RD) policies. RD is regarded as a problem of interaction between individuals; (lacking) structural change or the (missing) integration of externalities are therefore recon-structed as...