In this contribution we study the relationship between income inequality and economic freedom for a panel of 100 countries for the 1971-2010 period. From a panel causality study we find that income inequality has a negative causal effect on economic freedom, while causation does not run in the...

We examine the role of market-capitalism in anti-American terrorism, differentiating between level- and rate-of-change-effects associated with market-capitalist development and their respective relationship with anti-U.S. violence. Using panel data for 149 countries between 1970 and 2007, we...

We examine the effect of population size on government size for a panel of 130 countries for the period between 1970 and 2014. We show that previous analyses of the nexus between population size and government size were incorrectly specified, not accounting for cross-sectional dependence,...

In recent years, a number of major terrorist attacks in EU member states has put the fight against homegrown and international terrorism at the top of the agenda of European policy-makers. This paper analyzes the costs of terrorism in the European Union from both a theoretical and empirical...

We empirically examine the impact of oil wealth on property rights protection for a sample of 156 countries between 1960 and 2014. We find that higher levels of oil wealth result in weaker private property rights. This result is robust to different instrumental-variable approaches and...

Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? To answer this question, we collect data on 173 countries between 1968 and 2014. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the global patterns of U.S. military aid, our paper is the first to provide causal estimates of the effect of U.S. military...

This chapter discusses the role of military interventionism and aid in nation-building. We argue that (1) intervention strategies of foreign actors like the United States often unfavorably interact with local institutional settings, which (2) produces undesired outcomes not only for the target...

Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? Or does it have unintended consequences for U.S. security? To answer these questions, we estimate the effect of U.S. military aid on anti-American terrorism for a sample of 174 countries between 1968 and 2018. We find that higher levels of aid...

Large-scale land acquisitions, or land grabs, concentrate in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendly setting caused by a weak institutional framework. We argue that corrupt elites exploit this given institutional set-up to strike deals with international investors...

Since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington D.C., the fight against international terrorism has been a dominant issue in the political arena. Policy-makers (still) face the challenge to develop sound strategies for fighting this type of terrorist activity. Unfortunately, there is no...