Military expenditures are often funded by debt, and sovereign borrowers are more likely to renege on debt-service obligations if they lose a war than if they win one or if peace prevails. This makes expected debt service costlier in peace, which can affect both crisis bargaining and war...

Abstract: I apply the Beveridge-Nelson business cycle decomposition method to the time series of per capita murder in the State of Massachusetts. (1933-2005). Separating out “permanent” from “cyclical” murder, I hypothesize that the cyclical part coincides with documented waves of...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that the severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered political centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and...

This paper uses a formal model to analyze the effects of military competition between states on the size and composition of the economy and the government. Great economies of scale in warfare and even distributions of military capability among the contestants generate intense interstate rivalry,...

This paper aims at introducing the plurality of search methods in a job search model with endogenous intensity. Search methods are integrated through a function of information production, which influences both the offer rate and search costs. The equilibrium proprieties of the model lead to an...

This paper provides new developments in job search theory, incorporating a duality in search strategies which compose the offer rate. Two strategies are modelled. A first one, called passive strategy, consists in searching exclusively in the spatial area of the public employment agency. The...

Financial systems across the world have all come under pressure due to the on-going financial crisis. One of the most often asked questions during a collapse is how long and how deep will the decline be as well as what policy initiatives can be employed to shorten the recession. This study...