If contracting within the firm is incomplete, managers will expend resources on trying to appropriate a share of the surplus that is generated. We show that outside ownership may alleviate the deadweight losses associated with such costly distributional conflict, even if all it does is add...

Why do armed groups sometimes coerce and sometimes not? Civilian suffering due to coercion in conflicts is larger; yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that armed groups often choose not to coerce. To explain the observed variation in coercive practices, I combine a two-sector specific-factos trade...

A contest is a game where several players compete for winning prizes by expending costly efforts. We assume that the outcome of a contest is an ordered partition of the set of players (a ranking) and a contest success function assigns a probability to each possible outcome as a function of...

We study the role of inter-group differences in the emergence of conflict. In our setting, two groups compete for the right to allocate societys resources, and we allow for costly intergroup mobility. The winning group offers an allocation, that the opposition can either accept, or reject and...

Envy is often the cause of mutually harmful outcomes. We experimentally study the impact of envy in a bargaining setting in which there is no conflict in material interests: a proposer, holding the role of residual claimant, chooses the size of the pie to be shared with a responder, whose share...

Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies the problem of collective action. We...

This article investigates the impact of the distribution of preferences on equilibrium behavior in conflicts that are modeled as all-pay auctions with identity-dependent externalities. In this context, we define centrists and radicals using a willingness-to-pay criterion that admits preferences...

This paper examines how Nepal's 1996-2006 civil conflict affected women's decisions to engage in employment. Using three waves of Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, we employ a difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of war on women's employment decisions. Results indicate...

This paper is the first study that analyzes the drivers of political protest using longitudinal data from a critical revolution that changed -at least temporarily- the political landscape in a transition country. We make use of a rich dataset consisting of panel data collected before and after...

People exhibit group reciprocity when they retaliate, not against the person who harmed them, but against somebody else in that person's group. Group reciprocity may be a key motivation behind intergroup conflict. We investigated group reciprocity in a laboratory experiment. After a group...