Post-conflict societies face two distinctive challenges: economic recovery and risk reduction. Aid and policy reforms have been found to be highly effective in the economic recovery. In this paper we concentrate on the other challenge, risk reduction. The post-conflict peace is typically...

The holding of elections has become universal but only about half of all elections have been free and fair.  Electoral malpractice not only distorts the quality of representation but has implications for political, social and economic outcomes.  Existing datasets either provide broad...

Using global data we examine the dynamics of migration from developing to developed countries.  Origin and destination countries are characterized by substantial diffrences in incomes, political rights and cultures.  Incentives as well as costs shape the decision to migrate.  One powerful...

Previous studies into aid allocation have concluded that foreign aid is allocated not only according to development needs but also according to donor self-interest.  We revisit this topic and allow for donor as well as recipient specific effects in our analysis.  Our results indicate that...

In mature democracies, elections discipline leaders to deliver good economic performance.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union most developing countries also hold elections, but these are often marred by illicit tactics.  Using a new global data set, this paper investigates whether these...

In this paper we investigate the efficacy of illicit electoral tactics and the characteristics which make a society prone to such tactics.  We first investigate the chances of an incumbent head of government winning an election.  We find that in those elections in which illicit tactics were...

Deliberate killing is a common part of the defining features of both homicide and civil war. Often, the scale of killing is also similar: most countries have homicide rates that exceed the threshold of one thousand combat-related deaths during a year that is the standard criterion for civil war....

A key distinction among theories of civil war is between those that are built upon motivation and those that are built upon feasibility. We analyze a comprehensive global sample of civil wars for the period 1965-2004 and subject the results to a range of robustness tests. The data constitute a...

We investigate the causes of civil war, using a new data set of wars during 1960-99. We test a greed theory focusing on the ability to finance rebellion, against a grievance theory focusing on ethnic and religious divisions, political repression and inequality. We find that greed considerably...

The Nordic development assistance programs have earned a reputation for commitment to human rights and democracy. Is the reputation deserved? We address this question by comparing how much aid donors give and to which recipient countries. Using a global panel data set, spanning the period...