Political organizations engaged in long-term operations are viewed as firms that sell promises: their output is the expectation of a reorganization of society. Because benefits will accrue to the organization's customers and rewards will be paid out to its workers only if and when the goal is...

This paper views Islamist radicals as self-interested political revolutionaries and builds on a general model of political extremism developed in a previous paper (Ferrero, 2002), where extremism is modelled as a production factor whose effect on expected revenue is initially positive and then...

The Roman Catholic Church has been turning out new saints for two millennia. The argument advanced here is that the saint-making process is arranged as an open contest for sainthood: by combining competitive initiative and pressure from below with exclusive adjudication from above, it provides...

This paper offers an economic interpretation of Christianity's transformation from sect to universal religion in the Roman empire. It first points out paganism's apparent inability to provide individual security in times of distress, such as the third century C.E., as a reason for the increasing...