To learn more about the effect of economic conditions on civil war, we examine whether Sub-Saharan civil wars are more likely to start following downturns in the international price of countries' main export commodities. The data show a robust effect of commodity price downturns on the outbreak...

Does an expansion of the population size expose nation states to a higher risk of suffering from civil conflict? Obtaining empirical evidence for a causal relationship is difficult due to reverse effects and omitted variable bias. This article addresses causality issues by using randomly...

Motivated by the observed relevance of institutional quality, such as strong property rights, for economic performance, this research considers the emergence of property rights protection as a political outcome. It argues that the support for such protection is greater the more equal income...

In this short paper I adopt the public choice school paradigm of modeling a government in order to compare its performance with that of the market in the standard model of the provision of public goods. Private provision is represented by the Cournot-Nash equilibrium in individual contributions....

A government may adopt extreme policies (policies lying outside the interval between the ideal points of the political parties) for electoral purposes. It can benefit when a change in policy is costly and when the opposing party cannot commit to maintaining the status quo.

Contests have different, sometimes quite complex, organisational structures. In particular, while most of the existing literature focuses on simultaneous contests, multistage contests are also quite frequently encountered. This paper seeks to provide a rationale for the latter by endogenising...