Are natural resources a source of conflict or stability? Empirical studies demonstrate that rents from natural resources, and in particular oil, are an important source of civil war. Allegedly, resource rents attract rent seekers, which destabilize society. However, there is a large literature...

The “Intended nationally determined contributions” (INDCs) communicated by both developing and developed countries represent a crucial element of the Paris agreement. This paper aims at analysing the INDCs submitted by Parties, through the different tools and approaches proposed by the...

This paper analyses the statistical distribution of war size. We find strong support for a Pareto-type distribution (power law) using data from different sources (COW and UCDP) and periods. A power law describes accurately the size distribution of all wars, but also the distribution of the...

After the Soviet breakup, Central Asia has gained importance for several States because of its geographical location and abundance of hydrocarbon reserves. These hydrocarbon reserves are located mainly in three countries: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Each of them has taken different...

Cap-and-trade systems have emerged as the preferred national and regional instrument for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases throughout the industrialized world, and the Clean Development Mechanism - an international emission-reduction-credit system - has developed a substantial constituency,...

The China-Raw Materials dispute recently arbitrated by the WTO opposed China as defendant to the US, the EU and Mexico as claimants on the somewhat unusual issue of export restrictions on natural resources. For the claimants, Chinese export restrictions on various raw materials, of which the...

This paper presents a game-theoretic model of network formation, which allows agents to enter bilateral alliances and to extract payoffs from enemies. Each pair of agents creates a surplus of one, which allies divide in equal parts. If agents are enemies, then the agent with more allies obtains...

The general attitude towards the sustainable management of environmental resources is evolving towards the implementation of participatory (as opposed to the classical command and control) and, especially at local scale, bottom up (as opposed to the classical top down) approaches. This progress...

This paper analyzes farsighted stable sets when agents have heterogeneous expectations over the dominance paths. We consider expectation functions satisfying two properties of path-persistence and consistency. We show that farsighted stable sets with heterogeneous expectations always exist and...

We study the role of an enforcer in the effectiveness of selective incentives in solving the collective action problem when groups take part in a contest. Cost functions exhibit constant elasticity of marginal effort costs. If prize valuations are homogeneous, our source of heterogeneity induces...