We model growth in dictatorships facing each period an endogenous probability of “political catastrophe'' that would extinguish the regime's wealth extraction ability. Domestic capital exhibits a bifurcation point determining economic growth or shrinkage. With low initial domestic capital the...

The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist wars, both of which exhibit remarkable regularities. The frequency-intensity distribution of fatalities in "old wars", 1816-1980, is a power-law with exponent 1.80....

We process the main written output of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Colombia covering the period 1988-2004, recording all numerical conflict information and accounts of specific conflict events. We check for internal consistency and against a unique Colombian conflict database....

Analysis of our new, 16-year dataset on the Colombian civil war finds under Uribe: guerrilla and paramilitary attacks dropping sharply to long-run averages since 1988, lower for April- December, 2003; government-guerrilla clashes at all-time highs, exceeding guerrilla attacks; civilian killings...

We formulate an infinite-horizon Bayesian learning model in which the planner faces a cost from switching actions that does not approach zero as the size of the change vanishes. We recast the model as a dynamic programming problem which will always have a continuous value function and an optimal...