This paper uses data from the UEFA Champions League tournament between 2003 and 2013 to study the impact of diversity on group performance. We find that more diverse teams outperform less diverse ones. All else equal, a one-standard deviation increase in the average team's linguistic distance...

In this paper we introduce an innovative method to diagnose electoral fraud using vote counts. First, to circumvent data availability problems and to study a particular type of fraud, we create synthetic data using Monte Carlo methods. Next, we build a supervised machine learning tool and use a...

This paper revisits one historical event that has been repeatedly discussed by the literature on democratic breakdown: the rise and fall of Argentine democracy between 1916 and 1930. First, we demonstrate why socioeconomic factors are not a convincing explanation for the 1930 coup. Instead, we...

Can some acts of violence be explained by a society's quot;culturequot;? Scholars have found it hard to empirically disentangle the effects of culture, legal institutions, and poverty in driving violence. We address this problem by exploiting a natural experiment offered by the presence of...

The main goal of this paper is to debunk a series of myths regarding the proximate causes of the so-called Great Recession of 2008-09. I focus on the Baring crisis of 1890, that involved Great Britain and Argentina. The factors behind the 1890 crisis were virtually identical to those surrounding...

We study whether crony governance can extend beyond economic policy to the targeting of state violence against citizens. We do so with a micro-analysis of state repression by the Argentine military junta that took power in March 24, 1976. Specifically, we examine the logic driving the choice of...

There is a rich literature in comparative politics discussing what makes democracies fragile and more likely to break down. The question has stimulated a substantial amount of research focusing on the fate of specific countries as well as on large cross-national comparisons over long periods of...