This paper analyzes the spread of mafia in Northern Italy. In particular this study aims at showing that public funding of infrastructure attracts the transplantation of such criminal organizations. I assemble a new dataset on mafia-related crimes, which provide information at provincial level...

The article uses house prices to measure the peace dividend in Northern Ireland - and draws lessons for other parts of the world that have endured long conflicts.

We re-examine the labor donation theory of not-for-profits and show that these organizations may exist not necessarily because motivated workers prefer to work in them, or that they dominate for-profits in terms of welfare, but because the excess supply of motivated workers makes the non-profit...

The conflict in Northern Ireland was an example of "complex warfare" with both insurgency and sectarian violence. We present a unified model that helps to identify these two forms of conflict from the spatial distribution of violence. The model predicts that tectonic boundaries between...

This paper estimates the effect of piracy attacks on shipping costs using a unique data set on shipping contracts in the dry bulk market. We look at shipping routes whose shortest path exposes them to piracy attacks and find that the increase in attacks in 2008 lead to around a ten percent...

This article proposes a new measure of civil war. The measure defines violence intensity in casualties per capita instead of number of casualties. We discuss the assumptions behind this per capita model and the existing standard model. We show that the two measures behave differently in standard...

This paper exploits data on the pattern of violence across regions and over time to estimate the impact of the peace process in Northern Ireland on house prices. We begin with a linear model that estimates the average treatment effect of a conflictrelated killing on house prices - showing a...

This article builds a microfounded model of cultural conflict. In this model, intrinsically motivated cultural leaders supply and interpret culture. Leaders have an incentive to amplify disagreement about cultural values. This leads to a clash of perspectives between cultures. The population...

This comment highlights different ways of coding crisis episodes in Cerra and Saxena (2008) (CS). The comment shows that the coding used for civil war implies a misrepresentation of its impact. A correct coding of civil war reveals that the average civil war leads to a loss in output of 18...

We present a formal model of intra-party politics to explain candidate selection within parties. We think of parties as heterogeneous groups of individuals who aim to implement a set of policies but who differ in their priorities. When party heterogeneity is too large, parties are in danger of...