The two volumes of Understanding Civil War build upon the World Bank's prior research on conflict and violence, particularly on the work of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, whose model of civil war onset has sparked much discussion on the relationship between conflict and development in what came...

Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an...

The authors combine an empirical model of external intervention, with a theoretical model of civil war duration. Their empirical model of intervention allows them to analyze civil war duration, using "expected" rather than "actual" external intervention as an explanatory variable in the duration...

Quantitative studies of civil war have focused either on war's onset, or its termination, producing important insights into these end points of the process. The authors complement these studies by studying how much war we are likely to observe in any given period. To answer this question, they...

We evaluate two diagnostic tools used to determine if counterfactual analysis requires extrapolation. Counterfactuals based on extrapolation are model dependent and might not support empirically valid inferences. The diagnostics help researchers identify those counterfactual “what if”...

How does economic hardship affect social preferences? Do people feel more solidarity with one another, as often happens after natural disasters? Or does it reduce pro-sociality by making social divisions more salient? We address these questions by analysing the social effects of economic...

The European debt crisis gave rise to policies of fiscal austerity designed to instill discipline and return economies to growth after a short-lived period of structural adjustment. Greece received several bailouts conditional on implementing severe spending cuts and structural reforms. These...

Why do groups want to secede and where are we most likely to see demands for self-determination? This paper proposes an economic explanation whereby a tradeoff between income and sovereignty implies that, other things being equal, richer regions are more likely to want more autonomy and conflict...

We examine how external intervention interacts with ethnic polarization to induce rebellion and civil war. Previous literature views polarization as internally produced --- the result of demographic characteristics or inter-group differences made salient by ethnic entrepreneurs. We complement...

Why do groups want to secede and where are we most likely to see demands for self-determination? This paper proposes an economic explanation whereby a tradeoff between income and sovereignty implies that, other things being equal, richer regions are more likely to want more autonomy and conflict...