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 cohorts. Our empirical evidence is based on Nepal, which experienced a ten year long civil conflict of varying...

Conventional wisdom in economic history suggests that conflict between countries can be enormously disruptive of economic activity, especially international trade. Yet nothing is known empirically about these effects in large samples. We study the effects of war on bilateral trade for almost all...

Does growing up with a sister rather than a brother affect personality? In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of siblings' gender on adults' personality, using data from 85,887 people from 12 large representative surveys covering 9 countries (the United States, the...

Social conflict pervades human society and fulfils a number of essential functions in its development and transformation, including the creation of new norms and institutions. The Historical Social Conflict Database (HiSCoD) is an ongoing project designed to provide to scholars and society at...

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...

This paper investigates how voters respond to threats to the nation by estimating the political effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis. To establish causality, I exploit the geographical variation induced by the range of the missiles: only U.S. localities within 1,000 nautical miles from Cuba could...

Why do sovereign states sometimes fail to settle territorial disputes peacefully? Also, why do even peaceful settlements of territorial disputes rarely call for the resulting border to be unfortified? This paper explores a class of answers to these questions that is based on the following...

We analyze binary choice models in communication networks, in which both, the formation of links in the network as well as the action choices are endogenous. We provide a complete characterization of the equilibrium action choices and networks, where agents choose their strategies - actions and...

In this paper we consider a deterministic complete information two groups contest where the effort choices made by the teammates are aggregated into group performance by the weakest-link technology (perfect complementarity), that is a "max-min group contest", as defined by Chowdhury et al....

We study effort provision and incentivisation in a Tullock group-contest with m Ï 2 groups that differ in size. A novel algorithmic procedure is presented that, under a symmetry assumption, explicitly characterises the equilibrium. Endogenous, optimal incentivisation schemes are then...