Previous research on international crisis theory paid much attention to correlations between audience costs and a state's advantage over its opponents in wars. The advantage of generating audience costs is that it makes credible a state's costly signal of its resolve via military threats....

While most civil wars seem to have an economic basis, they are generally pushed by political, ethnic, and religious differences. This paper attempts to identify the drivers of the Syrian civil war of 2011 by investigating the role of ethnic divisions in starting a conflict. We integrate a...

While most civil wars seem to have an economic basis, they are generally pushed by political, ethnic, and religious differences. This paper attempts to identify the drivers of the Syrian civil war of 2011 by investigating the role of ethnic divisions in starting a conflict. We integrate a...

This paper analyzes a tug of war contest between two teams. In each round of the tug of war a pair of agents from the opposing teams competes in a private value all-pay auction with asymmetric type distributions and effort effectiveness. Whichever team arrives first at a given lead in terms of...

We study the 420 US drone strikes in Pakistan from 2006-2016, isolating causal effects on terrorism, anti-US sentiment, and radicalization via an instrumental variable strategy based on wind. Drone strikes are suggested to encourage terrorism in Pakistan, bearing responsibility for 16 percent of...

We estimate the opportunity cost for Iran due to the Islamic revolution and eight years' war with Iraq (1978/79-1988). We apply the synthetic control method in order to compare Iran with a synthetic Iran and answer this counterfactual question. Our results show that, in total, an average Iranian...

We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the role of civilian agency in conflict; on wartime...

In seinem Vortrag spricht sich Frank Elbe, Botschafter a. D., für ein besonnenes und überlegtes Vorgehen Deutschlands und der Europäischen Union gegenüber Russland aus. Die Bereitschaft zur Kooperation sollte nicht verlorengehen. Deutschland könne dabei auf seine erfolgreichen Rezepte der...

Throughout history, victory in conflict has created fearsome reputations. With it, the victor ensures greater allegiance of the wider population, increasing their rents at the expense of their enemy. Such reputational concerns generate two motives for conflict. When only victory or defeat is...

We assess the robustness of previous findings on the determinants of terrorism. Using extreme bound analysis, the three most comprehensive terrorism datasets, and focusing on the three most commonly analyzed aspects of terrorist activity, i.e., location, victim, and perpetrator, we re-assess the...