The Clash of Brothers: Wars to Avoid Diffusion in a Contagious World
Journal: Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University)
Year: 2015

My dissertation explores macro-level questions in Political Economy. Using the toolbox of Economics, I find a new reason for international conflict: cultural similarity.\nTwo culturally similar nations may have very different political regimes (e.g. the two Koreas). The cultural similarity encourages citizens to compare the different political regimes, which in turn threatens a dictator. I formalize this process of political contagion in an infinitely-repeated bargaining model and show that more