This research establishes that the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrastate conflicts in the modern era reflect the long shadow of prehistory. Exploiting variations across national populations, it demonstrates that genetic diversity, as determined predominantly during the...

In many historical cases victory by a challenger for political dominance over an initially dominant group has ended civil conflict. But, in other places victory by a challenger has provided only a temporary respite, a brief intermission before the resumption of civil conflict. This paper uses a...

This paper suggests that societies exhibiting a large degree of educational polarization among its populace are systematically more likely to slip into civil conflict and civil war. Intuitively, political preferences and beliefs of highly educated citizens are likely to differ fundamentally from...

After introducing a measure for educational polarization (EduPol ), this paper presents a theoretical framework to understand whether and how EduPol may affect the contest for power in society. The model suggests that societies with high degrees of EduPol (i.e., substantial shares with either no...

This paper presents a novel approach to accounting for subnational conflict exposure and provides new insights into the causal medium-run effects of conflict on economic development. The existing literature has not reached a consensus on whether civil conflict can permanently alter economic...

The energy transition increases the demand for minerals from ethnically diverse, conflict-prone developing countries. We study whether and where mining is possible in such countries without raising the risk of civil conflict. We proceed in three steps: First, we propose a theoretical model to...

We obtain rich measurements of risk preferences for 2939 subjects across 30 countries, and use the data to paint a picture of the distribution of risk preferences across the globe using structural equation models. Reference‐dependence and likelihood‐dependence are found to be important...

Selecting among alternative projects is a core management task in all innovating organizations. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of frontier scientific research projects. We argue that the intellectual distance between the knowledge embodied in research proposals and an evaluator's own...

How do insurgents choose their tactics in civil wars? While most theories of civil war violence marginalize the role of ideology, we argue that the location, type, and lethality of insurgent violence are all shaped by the underlying spatial distribution of civilians' relative support for...

How does conflict exposure affect trust? We hypothesize that direct (firsthand) experience with conflict induces parochialism: trust towards out-groups worsens, but trust towards in-groups, owing to positive experiences of kin solidarity, may improve. Indirect exposure to conflict through...