Despite a significant expansion of the literature on conflicts and fragility of states, only a few systematic attempts have been made to link the theoretical literature on social conflicts to the available micro-level information about the people who are involved in these conflicts. We address...

This article examines the role of business in the historical development of job security regulations in Germany from their creation in the inter-war period to the dawn of the crisis of the 'German Model' in the 1980s. It contrasts the varieties of capitalism approach, which sees business as...

We model an infinitely repeated Tullock contest, over the sharing of some given resource, between two ethnic groups. The resource is allocated by a composite state institution according to relative ethnic control; hence the ethnic groups contest the extent of institutional ethnic bias. The...

This paper investigates the empirical role of violent conflicts for the causal effect of democracy on economic growth. Exploiting within-country variation to identify the effect of democratization during the "Third Wave", we find evidence that the effect of democratization is weaker than...

The effect of ethnic violence on electoral results provides useful insights into voter behaviour in democratic societies. Religious riots have claimed more than 14,000 lives in India since 1950. We study the effect of Hindu-Muslim riots on election results in India. We combine data on riots,...

We use the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) household survey from post-conflict Kosovo to examine economic deprivation among Serbs and Albanians. Economic deprivation is measured by per capita household expenditure and by the incidence of poverty as captured by the headcount ratio. We...

The unprecedented consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic have raised concerns about intensified social unrest, but evidence for such a link and the underlying channels is still lacking. We use a unique combination of nationally representative survey data, event data on social unrest, and data on...

Climate change and the increasing demand of water intensify the global water cycle, altering the distribution of water in space and time. This is expected to result in wet areas getting wetter and dry areas getting drier (Pan et al., 2015). As water is key to life, water scarcity is likely to...

States, in their conflicts with militant groups embedded in civilian populations, often resort to policies of collective punishment to erode civilian support for the militants. We attempt to evaluate the efficacy of such policies in the context of the Gaza Strip, where Israel's blockade and...

While most civil wars seem to have an economic basis, they are generally pushed by political, ethnic, and religious differences. This paper attempts to identify the drivers of the Syrian civil war of 2011 by investigating the role of ethnic divisions in starting a conflict. We integrate a...