I study the integration of regions in the form of a merger of populations, which I interpret as a revision of people's social space and their comparison set; I illustrate the way in which a merger can aggravate social distress; and I consider policy responses. Specifically, I view the merger of...

In this paper I study policy responses to an increase in post-merger distress. I consider the integration of regions and nations as a merger of populations which I view as a revision of social space, and I identify the effect of the merger on aggregate distress. The paper is based on the premise...

Outcomes of the shallow lake interest conflict are presented in a number of different contexts: quasi-static and dynamic social planning, and quasi-static one-shot and repeated non-cooperative play. As the underlying dynamics are non-convex, the analysis uses geometrical-numerical methods: the...

We interpret the psychology literature on social identity and examine its implications in a population partially composed of such agents. We model a population of agents from two exogenous and well defined social groups. Agents are randomly matched to play a reduced form bargaining game. We show...

It stands to reason that social unrest does not erupt out of the blue. Although there are a great many reasons why social dismay might descend into social disorder, only few yardsticks or indices can plausibly be used to gauge the potential for social unrest (PSU). If policy makers want to...

Financial development is vulnerable to social conflict. Conflict reduces the demand for domestic currency as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Conflict also leads to poor quality governance, including weak regulation of the financial system, thereby undermining the sustainability of...

We analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e.shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) affect the intensity of social conflict. We see conflict phenomena such as crime and civil war as involving resource appropriation activities. We show that not all shocks that could make society richer...

This paper presents a simple model to show how distributional concerns can engender social conflict. We have a two period model, where the cost of conflict is endogenous in the sense that parties involved have full control over how much conflict they can create. We find that anticipated future...