The relationship between trade and foreign-policy goals has led to growing debates in the field of international economics and international relations. Most studies are cross-national and use interstate disputes to proxy the national security interests. We focus on the U.S., the world’s...

In this paper we show that in highly unequal societies, different societal groups may support a rent-seeking dicator serving their interests better than the median voter in a democratic regime. Importantly, it is the stakes of dictator in the economy, in the form of capital ownership, that...

Our paper explores the economic conditions that lead third parties to intervene in ongoing internal wars. We develop a formal model that ties together some of the main forces driving the decision to interfere in a civil war, including the economic benefits accruing from the intervention and the...

We propose a model where an autocrat rules over an ethnically divided society. The dictator selects the tax rate over domestic production and the nation's natural resources to maximize his rents under the threat of a regime-switching revolution. We show that a weak ruler may let the country...