We study the long-run effects of conflict on social attitudes, with World War II in Central and Eastern Europe as our setting. Much of earlier work has relied on selfreported measures of victimization, which are prone to endogenous misreporting. With our own survey-based measure, we replicate...

In recent years, a number of major terrorist attacks in EU member states has put the fight against homegrown and international terrorism at the top of the agenda of European policy-makers. This paper analyzes the costs of terrorism in the European Union from both a theoretical and empirical...

The conflict in Northern Ireland was an example of "complex warfare" with both insurgency and sectarian violence. We present a unified model that helps to identify these two forms of conflict from the spatial distribution of violence. The model predicts that tectonic boundaries between...

Entrepreneurs are often situated in extreme environments characterized by violent conflict. Yet, war is largely a blind spot in entrepreneurship scholarship. As a first step to closing this gap, we offer a well-identified synthetic control study of entrepreneurial dynamics in the Russo-Ukrainian...

This paper examines the consequences of a government mimicking the policy of its competitor by studying the introduction of the welfare state in 19th century Germany. The reform conducted by the conservative government targeted blue-collar workers and aimed to reduce the success of the socialist...

The problem of treaty between Ukraine and Russia about the implementation of economic, political and other activities of these countries at the Crimea region is practically not covered in the scientific literature. At the same time, the current activities of both countries require a number of...

Coercive institutions are essential components of authoritarian states and contribute to regime durability. However, variation in the internal structures of these institutions remains relatively unexplored. I argue that frequent intra-agency reforms of coercive institutions shape the incentives...

Few social scientists have equaled the impact on political science of Douglass C. North, co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1993. His extraordinary influence emanated from his ideas but was also a result of his vast social network of collaborators, students, and friendly...

Can a major shock in childhood permanently shape trust? We consider a hunger episode in Germany after WWII and construct a measure of hunger exposure from official data on caloric rations set monthly by the occupying forces providing regional and temporal variation. We correlate hunger exposure...

Limited attention and selective memory are important forms of cognitive bias. We investigate how present events trigger selective recall, thereby changing economic behavior. The 2010-14 sovereign debt crisis in Greece created massive political conflict between the German and Greek governments....