By facilitating the flow of information in society, communications technology (CT; e.g., newspapers, radio, television, the internet) can help terrorists to (i) spread their message, (ii) recruit followers, and (iii) coordinate among group members. However, CT also facilitates monitoring and...

We perform an empirical investigation of the socioeconomic determinants and consequences of all mass shootings in the U.S. from 2000 to 2015. We first manually search for and collect information on perpetrators. We find that approximately 40% (45%) of shooters were in financial distress...

This is a preliminary draft of the last of the eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter ventures modestly into hortatory territory, in contrast to the explanatory focus of the preceding chapters. It...

Sub-Saharan African countries have undergone fundamental changes in political regime type, but political institutions which allocate power and determine how it is transferred have not witnessed any fundamental change. This has resulted in what we term adverse political selection; a mismatch...

How do political elites exploit salient historical events to reactivate collective memories and entrench their power? We study this question using data from the Russian Federation under Putin. We document a substantial recollection campaign of the traumatic transition the Russian population...

To what extent does the degree of authoritarian political support depend on collective memories of a past experience with democracy? And how costly is it for a dictator to manipulate such memories with the help of propaganda? In this paper, we develop a political economy model with endogenous...

We study the effect of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath on migration intentions of the Egyptian youth. We measure revolution intensity using the spacial variation in the number of deaths during the revolution from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution Wikithawra and...

We study the effect of the 2011 Egyptian revolution and its aftermath on migration intentions of the Egyptian youth. We measure revolution intensity using the spacial variation in the number of deaths during the revolution from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution Wikithawra and...

What determines the rejection of exogenously imposed institutions? To address this question, we exploit the transplantation of institutions that occurred when southern Italy was annexed to Piedmont, during the Italian unification process of the 1860s. We assemble a novel dataset on episodes of...

A prominent hypothesis suggests that violent uprisings against the ruling elites have played an important role in shaping the distribution of power and prosperity. This paper employs newly-collected historical data from Finland to evaluate this hypothesis. We document that the country had...