Just like nearly every aspect of human experience, crime, civil conflict, and violence have become increasingly global. Around the world, civil wars, of which there are more today than at any time since the end of World War II, displace greater numbers of people ever further from their countries...

This paper analyzes the spatial distribution of refugees over 1987-2017 and establishes several stylized facts about refugees today compared with past decades. Refugees still predominantly reside in developing countries neighboring their country of origin. However, compared to past decades,...

Accurately measuring oil production in low-governance contexts is an important task. Many terrorist organizations and insurgencies-including the Islamic State group, also known as ISIL/ISIS or Daesh-tap oil as a revenue source. Understanding spatial and temporal variation in production in their...

In many developing countries, environmental quality remains low and policies to improve it have been inconsistently effective. This paper conducts a case study of environmental policy, focusing on an unprecedented ruling by the Supreme Court of India, which targeted industrial pollution in the...

Piracy off the coast of Somalia took the world by surprise when, within a six-year span (2005-2011), as many as 1,099 ships were attacked, among which more than 200 were successfully hijacked. In 2012 however, attacks had plummeted with no new hijacking reported between 2013 and mid-2015. The...

This paper compares redistribution through trade restrictions versus domestic lump-sum transfers. When preferences are non-homothetic, even domestic lump-sum transfers affect relative prices. Thus, contrary to the conventional wisdom, domestic lump-sum transfers are not necessarily superior to...