This paper analyses the effects of the EU Cohesion Policy (CP) on the economic growth of 276 European NUTS-2 regions between 2008 and 2016. Using a structural equation model (SEM) consisting of both a measurement component (with two latent variables) and a structural component, we estimate the...

This paper revisits the hypothesis that landlocked regions are systematically poorer than regions with ocean access, using panel data for 1,527 subnational regions in 83 nations from 1950-2014. This data structure allows us to exploit within-country-time variation only (e.g., regional variation...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

When do opposition groups decide to mount a terrorism campaign and when do they enter an open civil conflict against the ruling government? This paper models an opposition group's choice between peace, terrorism, and open conflict. Terrorism emerges if executive constraints are intermediate and...

To better understand potential relationships between income and terrorism, we study data for 1,527 subnational regions in 75 countries between 1970 and 2014. Results consistently imply an inverted U-shape that remains robust to accounting for a comprehensive set of region-level covariates,...

Within the fundamental determinants of cross-country income inequality, "humanly devised" political institutions represent a hallmark factor that societies can influence, as opposed to, for example, geography. Focusing on the portion of inequality explainable by differences in political...

This paper proposes a simple framework to better understand an opposition group's choice between peace, terrorism, and open civil conflict against the government. Our model implies that terrorism emerges if constraints on the ruling executive group are intermediate and rents are sizeable, hereas...