We study the relationship between inequality and inter-groups conflicts (riots), focusing on social inequality. Disadvantaged societal groups experience discrimination and thus have limited access to some social and labour resources like education or employment. First, we experimentally...

We develop a political economy model where some politicians have a comparative advantage in undertaking a task and this gives them an electoral advantage. This creates an incentive to underperform in the task in order to maintain their advantage. We interpret the model in the context of fighting...

How does the Internet affect authoritarian regimes? This article argues that while the Internet has made mass mobilization easier than ever, its spread has also counter-intuitively allowed savvy authoritarian regimes to become more stable than ever. For the population, higher technical literacy...

I develop a new method that structures financial market data to forecast economic outcomes. I use it to study the IT sector's transition to its long-run share in the US economy. The method uses a model which links economy-wide growth with IT's market valuation to match transition data on...

Two collective action problems plague successful revolution. On the one hand, would-be revolutionaries confront a quot;participation problemquot; whereby no rationally self-interested individual has an incentive to participate in rebellion. On the other hand, individuals face a quot;first-mover...

This paper argues that state weakness is broader than implied previously in the civil war literature, and that particular types of weakness in interaction with natural resources have aggravating or mitigating consequences for the risk of civil war. While in anocracies or unstable regimes natural...