This article argues that the link between income inequality and violent property crime might be spurious, complementing a similar argument in prior analysis by the author on the determinants of homicide. In contrast, Fajnzylber, Lederman & Loayza provide seemingly strong and robust evidence that...

This article tests the hypothesis that democracies exhibit stronger international environmental commitment than non-democracies, using multivariate econometric techniques. A number of proxy variables are used in lieu of environmental commitment, a non-observable variable. Strong evidence is...

The newly established International Criminal Court (ICC) promises justice to the victims of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Past offenders can be punished, while future potential offenders may be deterred by the prospect of punishment. Yet, justice is no substitute for...

This study investigates whether ethnic and other forms of social diversity affect militarization of society. Recent scholarship in economics finds that high diversity leads to lower provision of public goods. At the same time, many conflict studies find that highly diverse societies face a lower...

As the world becomes wealthier over time, inflation-adjusted insured damages from natural disasters go up as well. This article analyzes whether there is still a significant upward trend once insured natural disaster loss has been normalized. By scaling up loss from past disasters, normalization...

Although there is evidence that CO2-efficiency enhancing innovations in one country diffuse into other countries to contribute to the goals of climate change mitigation, very little is known about the conditions under which such international spillovers are most likely to take place. Our...

Climate change is likely to lead to an increase in the frequency and/or intensity of certain types of natural hazards, if not globally, then at least in certain regions. All other things equal, this should lead to an increase in the economic toll from natural disasters over time. Yet, all other...

After the nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many global and regional human rights treaties have been concluded. Critics argue that these are unlikely to have made any actual difference in reality. Others contend that international regimes can improve respect for human rights in...

Substantial variation in recognition rates for asylum claims from the same countries of origin subjects refugees to unfair and discriminatory treatment. This article demonstrates the extent of variation and lack of convergence over the period from 1980 to 1999 across Western European destination...

The hypothesis that political violence deters tourism is mainly based on case study evidence and a few quantitative studies confined to a small sample of countries. Two estimation techniques—a fixed-effects panel estimator with contemporaneous effects only and a dynamic generalized method...