Exploiting differences in occupation status in East Germany in the last days of World War II and shortly thereafter, we find that regions which - due to their occupation status - experienced a drastic supply problem caused by the influx of great numbers of refugees fleeing from the Red Army in...

German separation in 1949 into a communist East and a capitalist West and their reunification in 1990 are commonly described as a natural experiment to study the enduring effects of communism. We show in three steps that the populations in East and West Germany were far from being randomly...

We study the role of an imbalance in fighting strengths when players bargain in the shadow of conflict. Our experimental results suggest: In a simple bargaining game with an exogenous mediation proposal, the likelihood of conflict is independent of the balance of power. If bargaining involves...

This contribution studies the impact of modernization on the onset of Islamist conflict. To capture the multi-dimensional phenomenon of modernization, we create a unique modernization index. Our empirical analysis for 154 countries for the 1971-2006 period provides robust evidence that...

We study a model of war in which the outcome of the war is uncertain from the perspective of the involved countries not because of luck on the battlefield (as in standard models) but because of their lack of information about their opponents. In our model there are two countries characterized by...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

We study an all-pay contest with multiple identical prizes (lifeboat seats). Prizes are partitioned into subsets of prizes (lifeboats). Players play a two-stage game. First, each player chooses an element of the partition (a lifeboat). Then each player competes for a prize in the subset chosen...

This paper empirically analyses the relationship between terror incidents and internal migration in Israel. Using a newly created database of region-to-region migration flows for the years 1998-2012, the empirical model regresses the annual flow of migrants from an origin subdistrict to a...

This paper analyses the impact of terrorism on tax enforcement policies by focusing on the case of the Basque Country. The presence of externalities in tax administration attributable to the costs of terrorism is investigated by undertaking a theoretical analysis. The findings of this are tested...