State's policies for agricultural markets may vary significantly among jurisdictions. Interest groups exercise a great deal of pressure over State organisms, ranging from the Congress to the Executive agencies that regulate or survey these markets. Therefore, a special treatment awarded by the...

State repression is a prominent feature of non-democracies, but its effectiveness in quieting dissent and fostering regime survival remains unclear. We exploit the location of military bases before the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile in 1973, which is uncorrelated to...

Offshoring is usually thought of in the context of globalization and economic activity. Yet a signal feature of the Bush Administration's quot;war on terrorquot; was the offshoring of core security functions. The most famous example is the use of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center, but many...

In His State of the Union Address, President Bush outlined the Advanced Energy Initiative to help break America's dependence on foreign sources of energy. The President has set a national goal of replacing more than 75% of U.S. oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. With America on the verge...

We construct a dynamic theory of civil conflict hinging on inter-ethnic trust and trade. The model economy is inhabitated by two ethnic groups. Inter-ethnic trade requires imperfectly observed bilateral investments and one group has to form beliefs on the average propensity to trade of the other...

We investigate the empirical impact of violence as compared to other trade impediments on trade flows. Our analysis is based on a panel data set with annual observations on 177 countries from 1968 to 1999, which brings together information from the Rose [2004] dataset, the ITERATE dataset for...

The paper presents a political economy model linking terror and governments' respect for human rights. Using panel data for 111 countries over the period 1973-2002, we then empirically analyze whether and to what extent terror affects human rights - measured by three indices covering a wide...

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We...

I critically review recent studies that estimate those costs of violence and conflict that can emerge among organized political groupings, from states, religious and ethnic organizations to guerillas and paramilitaries. The review includes studies that estimate direct and indirect costs due to...

Ethnic and religious fractionalization have important effects on economic growth and development, but their role in internal violent conflicts has been found to be negligible and statistically insignificant. These findings have been invoked in refutation of the Huntington hypothesis, according...