Can right-wing terrorism increase support for far-right populist parties, and if so, why? Exploiting quasi-random variation between successful and failed attacks across German municipalities, we find that successful attacks lead to significant increases in the vote share for the right-wing,...

When does organized crime resort to assassinating politicians? In narcocracies, criminal groups co-opt political elites through bribery in exchange for protection to traffic illegal drugs. When criminal groups compete, they may also resort to political violence to influence which candidate wins...

This paper aims to study corruption as an epidemic phenomenon using the epidemic diffusion model of Kermack and Mc-Kendrick (1927). We seek to determine the dynamics of corruption and its impact on the composition of the population at a given time. We determine a threshold epidemiological...

In a bribery experiment, we test the hypothesis that distributive fairness considerations make relatively well-paid public officials less corruptible. Corrupt decisions impose damages to workers whose wage is varied in two treatments. However, there is no apparent difference in behaviour.

We analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e.shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) affect the intensity of social conflict. We see conflict phenomena such as crime and civil war as involving resource appropriation activities. We show that not all shocks that could make society richer...

This paper investigates the influence of media on the beliefs and perceptions individuals hold, with a focus on crime perceptions. We study the case of Italy, where the majority of television channels have been under the influence of the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for more than a...

We examine how globalization affects trade patterns and welfare when conflict prevails domestically. We do so in a simple model of trade, in which a natural resource like oil is contested by competing groups using real resources (?guns?). Thus, conflict is viewed as ultimately stemming from...

This paper contributes to the ongoing methodological debate on context-free versus in-context presentation of experimental tasks. We report an experiment using the paradigm of a bribery experiment. In one condition, the task is presented in a typical bribery context, the other one uses abstract...

In recent debates, morality or social norms have been proposed as an instrument to reduce conflict behavior. As the argument goes, moral people will not engage in socially not-tolerated behavior or, less so than amoral people. Analyzing this question in the framework of contest theory, we find...

One possible solution to mitigate the negative influences of conflict which has been proposed in the literature is to subject the relevant parties to education. Education can take two forms: increasing an individual's human capital on the one hand, increasing her social capital on the other...