Achieving peace and building the institutions that will make it last require much time and effort on the part of adversaries. While making this effort, the likelihood of peace is uncertain and preparations for confict are on-going. We examine a setting that takes such considerations into...

I will try to make sense of this trend in this paper by formally showing how material growth increases the time spent working in the market while it reduces the time spent in gatherings, in sumposia, with others. Public discourse requires time, to read, think, and interact with others. It is...

For many countries in the world today and for much of history, investment in ordinary productive capital has been overshadowed by investment in enforcive capital: castles and siege machines; tanks, missiles and army barracks. We introduce a dynamic model which allows for investment in the latter...

The first principle of Economics is that every agent is actuated only by self-interest. The workings of this principle may be viewed under two aspects, according as the agent acts without, or with, the consent of others affected by his actions. In wide senses, the first species of action may be...

Conflict and war are typically viewed as the outcome of misperceptions, incomplete information, or even irrationality. We show that it can otherwise. Despite the short-run incentives to settle disputes peacefully , there can be long-term, compounding rewards to going to war when doing better...

Warlords complete for turf that provides them with rents and "taxable" resources while also providing a semblance of security within their respective territories. Because such competition takes place through the use of force or the threat of the use of force, more competition can lead to lower...

Existing work on the costs of insecure property has largely focused on the overexploitation problem of common pool resources. We investigate other costs of insecure resources - uncertainty costs, the absence of exchange, and enforcement costs - within a simple general equilibrium setting.