Donor reactions to recent settlements of internal conflicts have been highly diverse, in terms of both overall aid and its sectoral composition. The allocation of post-conflict aid tends to be needs-based by favoring particularly poor countries. There is no conclusive evidence, however, that the...

This paper highlights the importance of natural resource concentration and ethnic group regional concentration for ethnic conflict. A new type of bargaining failure due to multiple types of potential conflicts (and hence multiple threat points) is identified. The theory predicts war to be more...

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...

We study whether the spatial distribution of natural resources across different ethnic groups within countries impede spatial inequality, national economic performance, and the incidence of armed conflict. By providing a theoretical rent-seeking model and analysing a set of geocoded data for...

Kanazawa (J of Politics, 2009) claims that polygyny may be the "first law of intergroup conflict (civil wars)". Gleditsch et al. (J of Politics, 2011) reject this claim by showing that the effect of polygyny on civil war onset disappears once misogyny is controlled for. Our paper recapitulates...

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...

In conflict zones around the world, both state and non-state actors deliver governance at local levels. This paper explores the long-term impact of individual exposure to 'wartime governance' on social and political behaviour. We operationalize wartime governance as the local policy choices and...

There is a large empirical literature trying to quantify the potentially adverse affects of climate change on the risk of violent armed conflict, which focuses almost exclusively on linking annual variation in climatic conditions to violence. A major shortcoming of this approach is that it...

Civil wars are intricate social, political and psychological phenomena. However, economics can offer analytical insights which are useful alongside the more conventional approach of case-studies. Indeed, the policy conclusions drawn from economic analysis sometimes cast doubt on conventional...