This article investigates and compares the root causes of transnational terrorism and piracy. In order to accomplish this, we construct a novel data set that catalogues terrorist activity and piracy over the years 1992–2008, paying particular attention to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean since...

We consider a setup in which infinitely lived households face idiosyncratic investment risk and show that in this case the equilibrium distribution of wealth becomes increasingly right-skewed over time until wealth concentrates entirely at the top. The households in our setup are identical in...

Previous research has shown that trust is an important component that encourages investment and capital formation which, in turn, enhances economic performance. This article investigates the effect of terrorism on income, including its indirect role through lowering trust. We consider terrorism...

The author develops and tests a model to examine the economic effects of political instability and military expenditure. Defense plays three important roles in the model: (1) it provides insurance against political instability; (2) it augments the human capital stock by training the labour force;...

A theory is developed which predicts that people with extreme opinions are relatively rigid in that they are less inclined to modify their opinions That extremists tend to be rigid and moderates tend to be flexible is found to hold for members of the US Congress