We analyze how secession movements unfold and the interdependence of regions' decisions to secede. We first model and then empirically examine how secessions can occur sequentially because the costs of secession decrease with the number of seceders and because regions update their decisions...

This paper uses newly collected archival evidence to examine various aspects of the geographic performance of American labor markets before the Civil War. Much of the paper addresses the evolution of regional differences in real wages, of interest to economic historians because they speak to the...

In early 1862, the United States government began issuing Greenbacks, a legal tender currency that was not convertible into gold. The government promised to redeem the Greenbacks in gold eventually, but speculators understood that the probability of redemption depended on Union Army military...

This paper exploits the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War to estimate the causal effect of politician race on public finance. I overcome the endogeneity between electoral preferences and black representation using the number of free blacks in the antebellum era (1860) as an...

We analyze long-term impacts of the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War, providing the first evidence of intergenerational impacts. Women exposed to the war in their growing years exhibit reduced adult stature, increased likelihood of being overweight, earlier age at first birth, and lower educational...

This paper analyzes a five percent systematic sample of households from the manuscripts of the New York State Census of 1865, the first in the United States to ask a question on children ever born. The sample of seven counties (Allegany, Dutchess, Montgomery, Rensselaer, Steuben, Tompkins, and...

A notable feature of post-World War II civil wars is their very long average duration. We provide a theory of the persistence of civil wars. The civilian government can successfully defeat rebellious factions only by creating a relatively strong army. In weakly-institutionalized polities this...

This paper proposes a new method to measure ethnolinguistic diversity and offers new results linking such diversity with a range of political economy outcomes -- civil conflict, redistribution, economic growth and the provision of public goods. We use linguistic trees, describing the...

Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. The past decade has witnessed an explosion of research into the causes and consequences of civil wars, belatedly bringing the topic into the economics mainstream. This article critically reviews this interdisciplinary...

We develop and test an economic theory of insurgency motivated by the informal literature and by recent military doctrine. We model a three-way contest between violent rebels, a government seeking to minimize violence by mixing service provision and coercion, and civilians deciding whether to...