Most combatants in armed conflict are men, so naturally men are the major direct victims of military operations. Yet, armed conflicts have important indirect negative consequences on agriculture, infrastructure, public health provision and social order. These indirect consequences are often...

The authors address the question of state militarization under conditions of ethnic and other diversity. "Primordialist" claims about ancient hatreds, fear, and insecurity in such societies would lead one to expect that fractionalization, polarization, and ethno-nationalist exclusion would...

This paper suggests a three-stage procedure for the estimation of time-invariant and rarely changing variables in panel data models with unit effects. The first stage of the proposed estimator runs a fixed-effects model to obtain the unit effects, the second stage breaks down the unit effects...

The introduction of the Euro has considerably affected the de facto monetary policy autonomy - defined as statistical independence from monetary policy in the key currency areas - in countries outside the European Currency Union. Using a standard open economy framework we argue that de facto...

This paper analyses the properties of a computational model of multi-party competition in two and three policy dimensions. We present four substantive results: Firstly, centrifugal incentives prevent rational parties from moving to the mean of voters' preference distributions. Secondly, the...

Conflicts between EU members about enlargement result from its re-distributive effects. EU members are more likely to suffer from enlargement if they profit from EU transfers and if they are relatively close to applicant countries in which unemployment is significantly higher than in member...

The article provides a theoretical framework of international unions in the form of a two-stage game with discounting aimed at generating propositions about widening versus deepening in the integration process. Each player has a preference for a set of regulations. Regulatory differences between...

German educational spending per student has dramatically declined since the early 1970s. In this paper, we develop a theory of fiscal opportunism and argue that state governments exploit higher educational policies as an instrument of active labor market policy. By 'opening' universities to the...

The estimation of slowly and rarely changing variables in panel data with unobserved unit effects suffers from inefficiency of the fixed effects estimator. Point estimates lack reliability when the within variance (the variation across time) remains small. The estimate's efficiency can be...