We study the strategic interaction between a decision maker who needs to take a binary decision but is uncertain about relevant facts and an informed expert who can send a message to the decision maker but has a preference over the decision. We show that the probability that the expert can...

We establish a theoretical and empirical framework to assess the role of resource endowments and their geographic location in interstate conflict. The main predictions of the theory are that conflict is more likely when at least one country has natural resources, when the resources in the...

Since World War II there have been about fifty episodes of large-scalemass killings of civilians and massive forced displacements. They were usually meticulously planned and independent of military goals. We provide a model where conflict onset, conflict intensity and the decision to commit mass...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Uganda during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-04. We exploit two waves of...

A key distinction among theories of civil war is between those that are built upon motivation and those that are built upon feasibility. We analyze a comprehensive global sample of civil wars for the period 1965-2004 and subject the results to a range of robustness tests. The data constitute a...

No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

Social tensions impede social cohesion and public goods provision, and can be a driving force for more serious conflicts such as civil wars. Surprisingly, the emergence of social tensions has been studied only rarely in the literature. In the present contribution a game-theoretic model...