In the early 2000s, the Colombian government aired messages during games of the national football team, urging FARC rebels to demobilize. We first study the strategy's effectiveness, leveraging game dates, kick-off times, and spatial-temporal variation in rain-induced signal strength in a...

The financial means of international terror and organized crime organizations are analysed. First, some short remarks about the organization of international terror organizations are made. Second and in a much more detailed way a literature review is provided about the financing of terrorist and...

We study the 420 US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2006-2016, isolating causal effects on terrorism, anti-US sentiment, and radicalization via an instrumental variable strategy based on wind. Drone strikes are suggested to encourage terrorism in Pakistan, bearing responsibility for 16 percent of...

We show that the exposure to war-related violence increases the quantity of children temporarily, with permanent negative consequences for the quality of the current and previous cohort of children. Our empirical evidence is based on Nepal, which experienced a ten year long civil conflict of...

This paper studies the dynamics of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since the outbreak of the Second (or Al-Aqsa) Intifada in September 2000, during which more than 3,300 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis have been killed. The conflict has followed an uneven pattern, with...

This paper develops a theoretical framework that makes predictions on (a) the conditions under which a populist party decides to run and the policy position it takes and (b) voters' response under different electoral systems. We test these predictions using data on Italian municipal elections...

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...

Can religiosity sway a society's propensity for violence against outgroups? We first introduce two state-year-level religiosity measures for several pre-Enlightenment European states with the frequencies of (i) religious language in book publications and (ii) Christian names of newborns. To...