Homeland security against possible terrorist attacks involves making decisions under true uncertainty. Not only are we ignorant of the form, place, and time of potential terrorist attacks, we are also largely ignorant of the likelihood of these attacks. In this paper, we conceptualize homeland...

We analyse the role played by Export Credit Guarantees (ECGs) to encourage exports to developing countries. The existence of moral hazard on the side of the firm is introduced. We show that the inability of the exporter's government to verify the actual quality of the product will limit its...

Does the average level of sickness absence in a neighborhood affect individual sickness absence through social interaction on the neighborhood level? To answer this question, we consider evidence of local benefit-dependency cultures. Well-known methodological problems in this type of analysis...

Is the sickness absence of an individual affected by the sickness absence behavior of the neighbors? Well-known methodological problems, in particular the so-called reflection problem, arise when trying to answer such questions about group effects. Based on data from Sweden, we adopt several...

In many countries, sickness absence financed by generous insurance benefits has become an important concern in the policy debate. It turns out that there are strong variations in absence behavior between local geographical areas, and it has been difficult to explain these variations by...

The conflict-trade paradigm has been dominated by the liberal and realist schools of thought, which try to explain how and why trade affects conflict and cooperation. While the liberal point of view predicts a positive effect of levels of trade on cooperation, realists counter by arguing a...

The article compares civil strife in the public arena to labor strikes in the private arena. Both are predicated on incomplete information (both sides believing they can "win," when one – and possibly both – must "lose"). Reasons for conflict, especially in Africa, include the rent-based...

This article analyzes the impact of counter-terrorism policies, e.g., the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq, on the financial structure of European terror networks and argues that such policies, far from defeating Jihadist activities, ended up boosting them. In response to such measures, terror...

This piece introduces the new journal. This issue 'Conflict or Development?' has a regional focus on Africa. Joseph Stiglitz discusses the role of information in conflict and draws a fascinating analogy between civil strife and a labor strike. Paul Collier and Neil Cooper take different...