We empirically investigate the existence of spatial autocorrelation between military dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1977 through 2007. We apply a Bayesian SAR probit regression, extended to a pooled model. We find a robust and positive spatial autocorrelation coefficient, which shows a...

The article applies insights of contest theory to al Qaeda's recruitment process. Al Qaeda can be considered as a contest organizer rewarding an indivisible prize, namely, official membership and economic rewards, to candidate extremist groups. Would-be terrorists must then compete with each...

The point of departure of this paper is that players in a contest may have mixed motives. On one hand, players have the interest of winning the contest and taking the prize. On the other hand, they could be better off taking part in a contest which implies some cooperative behaviour. This paper...

Some Researchers consider soccer matches as the stylization of a war in other battlefields. Such approach was largely used to interpret the violent phenomena related to the soccer environment, while less attention has been paid to the «potential» role of political and economic interactions...

This paper considers a partial equilibrium model of conflict where two asymmetric, rational and risk-neutral opponents clash in order to redistribute a divisible prize in their favour. Differently from common contest models agents have the option of choosing a second instrument to affect the...

We define peace economics as the economic study and design of political, economic, and cultural institutions, their interrelations, and their policies to prevent, mitigate, or resolve any type of latent or actual destructive conflict within and between societies. Differentiating peace economics...

In this paper we empirically analyze the socio-economic determinants of the existence of military dictatorships in Africa. A recent literature in political economy analyses the relationship between the civil undemocratic government and the military as an agency problem: the civilian government...

We show the existence of a diffusion process of military dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1972 through 2007, using panel data probit estimation and a Markov chain transition model. This process is shortly-lived, since we observe an overall trend that reduces the number of military...

This paper presents a two-sector economy. In a contested sector two agents struggle to appropriate the maximum possible fraction of a contestable output. In an uncontested sector uncontested sector, they hold secure property rights over the production of some goods. Agents split their resource...

This paper analyzes the relationship between youth unemployment and Palestinian violence. First a qualitative explanation of the underlying mechanism is given. Eventually, empirical results suggest that there is a positive association between the growth rate of youth unemployment and the...