We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the role of civilian agency in conflict; on wartime...

This paper examines the effect of oil abundance on political violence. First, we revisit one of the main empirical findings of the civil conflict literature that oil abundance causes civil war. Using a unique panel dataset describing worldwide oil discoveries and extractions, we show that simply...

In this paper we examine the claim that natural resources invite civil conflict, and challenge the main stylized facts in this literature. We find that the nature of causation between resource dependence and civil war is opposite to conventional wisdom. In particular, (i) civil war creates...

Population movements will help people facing the impact of climate change. However, the resulting large scale displacements may also produce security risks for receiving areas. The objective of this paper is to empirically estimate if the inflows of climate-induced migrants increase the risk of...

Population movements will help people facing the impact of climate change. However, the resulting large scale displacements may also produce security risks for receiving areas. The objective of this paper is to empirically estimate if the inflows of climate-induced migrants increase the risk of...

We provide novel empirical models of the arms trade and focus on the role of energy dependence, in particular of oil, in explaining the trade of weapons between countries. Dramatic geopolitical events such as wars can cause significant disruptions in the supply of oil and increase oil prices....

We investigate how oil dependence affects the trade of weapons between countries. We argue that oil-dependent economies have incentives to transfer arms to oil-rich countries to reduce their risk of instability and, as a result, the chances of disruption in the oil industry. We employ gravity...

Using panel data and GMM estimators we find that conflict and less developed countries (LDCs) natural resources have a positive and significant impact on GDP in the developed countries (DCs), while the lagged value of the conflict coefficient has a negative and significant impact on GDP in the...

We empirically examine the impact of oil wealth on property rights protection for a sample of 156 countries between 1960 and 2014. We find that higher levels of oil wealth result in weaker private property rights. This result is robust to different instrumental-variable approaches and...

We document that an oil price boom triggers dissatisfaction with one's income, and confirm that this is not driven by changes in real economic conditions. Unique data from Kazakhstan allows us to exploit time, sectoral and spatial variation to identify the impact of the recent oil boom on...