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...

This paper proposes a new perspective for studying decentralization by considering it as the unbundling of public goods provision. We define centralization as the bundled provision of public goods from different tiers (national, sub-national or local) by one single provider held accountable by...

The existing literature on the determinants of terrorism treats terror as a uniform phenomenon and does not distinguish between different types of terror. This paper explicitly addresses the heterogeneity of terror by classifying groups according to their ideologies. We show that the pattern of...

We run an experiment that gives subjects the opportunity to hedge away ambiguity in an Ellsberg-style experiment. Subjects are asked to make two bets on the same draw from an ambiguous urn, with a coin flip deciding which bet is paid. By modifying the timing of the draw, coin flip, and decision,...

We provide new evidence about the mechanisms linking resource-related income shocks to conflict. To do so, we combine temporal variation in international drug prices with new data on spatial variation in opium suitability to examine the effect of opium profitability on conflict in Afghanistan....

The Savage and the Anscombe-Aumann frameworks are the two most popular approaches used when modeling ambiguity. The former is more flexible, but the latter is often preferred for its simplicity. We conduct an experiment where subjects place bets on the joint outcome of an ambiguous urn and a...

We study the effect of terrorist attacks on the migration discourse in the European Parliament (EP). First, using an LLM model, we develop an original dataset on sentiments of all parliamentary speeches concerning migration for 2009-2019, building on a novel dataset by Sylvester et al. (2023)....

We analyze the determinants of the excessive administrative spending of local governments in Indonesia. In an unbalanced panel data set of 399 districts for 2001-2009, we show that the proliferation of districts has not led to increased administrative spending; instead a lack of political...

The 10 states of Southeast Asia have combined to form the developing world's most successful and durable regional grouping, the Association of Southeast Asian Na-tions, ASEAN. Economic integration among them is high and increasing. The ambi-tious ASEAN Economic Community is scheduled to take...

We present a novel approach for measuring democracy, which enables a very detailed and sensitive index. This method is based on Support Vector Machines, a mathematical algorithm for pattern recognition. Our implementation evaluates 188 countries in the period between 1981 and 2011. The Support...