war revolution and the growth of the coercive state modern states are powerful resilient institutions the most durable of which have established and consolidated their rule through conquest revolution and war successful involvement in violent conflict leads to the development of militarized and police states and reinforces elite political cultures that favor the use of coercion in future disputes if warfare has unfavorable outcomes elites will prefer noncoercive strategies in the future from these and other propositions are derived models of the processes by which garrison states emerge and persist in autocracies and democracies states with high material capabilities are more likely to become garrison states than weaker states which tend to avoid international conflict and to rely on accommodation in internal conflicts states with low political capabilities are susceptible to revolutionary overthrow and the establishment of revolutionary garrison states the role of diversion of domestic conflicts to the external environment also is considered

the relationship between international trade and capital flow a network perspective abstract the relationship between international trade and capital flow has been extensively discussed using bilateral data from 2001 to 2016 we construct international trade and capital flow networks defined as a weighted graph in which nodes are countries and edges represent trade and capital flow linkages centrality is employed as the main variable in this study to represent the importance of a country in the networks to gain further insight into the network characteristics we adopt a turning parameter centrality to combine both the original degree and strength measurements within the weighted network moreover we develop a new indicator called partner quality centrality to identify the quality of neighbors within the panel cointegration framework we argue that a positive long run equilibrium exists between the trade and capital flow networks as constructed in addition we employ a panel causality test to investigate the short run dynamics indicating that the international capital flow network has predictive power on the trade network from the short run perspective but not vice versa

the armed peace a punctuated equilibrium theory of war according to a leading rationalist explanation war can break out when a large rapid shift of power renders unbelievable a rising state s promise to compensate its declin ing opponent causing the latter to attack preventively this mechanism does not provide a complete and coherent explanation of war because it does not specify how inefficient fighting resolves this commitment problem we present a complete information model of war as a sequence of battles and show that although opportunities for a negotiated settle ment arise throughout the very desirability of peace creates a commitment problem that undermines its likelihood because players have incentives to settle as soon as possible they cannot credibly threaten to fight long enough if an opponent launches a surprise at tack this decreases the expected duration and costs of war and causes mutual deterrence to fail fighting s sheer destruction improves the credibility of these threats by decreasing the benefits from continuing the war equilibrium fighting may involve escalating costs that exceed the value of the stakes by the time peace is negotiated and that leave both players worse off than when the war began

democratic states and international disputes a growing literature in international relations concludes that democratic states pursue distinctive foreign policies specifically democracies do not engage each other in war and only rarely engage each other in serious disputes short of war scholars have offered three basic explanations to support these findings each of the three invokes a different explanatory variable norms checks and balances and trade none of the three however provides a convincing explanation of the peace that is said to prevail between democratic polities the distinction between norms and interests is unclear substitutes for checks and balances exists in nondemocracies and trade can deter conflict only under restrictive conditions

political bias and war we examine the incentives for countries to go to war as they depend on the comparison between how much their pivotal decision makers have at risk and how much they stand to gain from a war how this ratio compares to the country at large is what we term political bias if there is no political bias then there are always payments that one country would like to make to the other that will avoid a war in the presence of commitment or enforceability of peace treaties if there is a bias on the part of one or both countries then war can result and in some cases cannot be prevented by any transfer payments we examine how war technology and relative wealth levels interact with political bias in determining whether countries make transfers go to war and form alliances our results shed some new light on the uneven contender paradox and the interpretation of the democratic peace

two sided markets with pecuniary and participation externalities the existing literature on two sided markets addresses participation externalities but so far it has neglected pecuniary externalities between competing platforms in this paper we build a model that incorporates both externalities in our setup differentiated platforms compete in advertising and offer consumers a service free of charge such as a tv program that is financed through advertising we show that advertising can exhibit the properties of a strategic substitute or complement surprisingly there exist cases in which platforms benefit from market entry moreover we show that from a welfare point of view perfect competition is not always desirable

the value of diffusing information abstract how does the speed by which information diffuses affect its value to a stock market investor in a structural model solved in closed form this speed has two opposing effects on the empirically dominant term of the value of information faster diffusing information means quicker and less noisy profits but also increases competing informed trading impounding more information into prices and eroding profits structural empirical analysis of stock market reaction to drug approvals using media coverage as a proxy for the transmission rate of information finds that the value of information is hump shaped in its future transmission rate moreover the estimated amount of noise trading is small

bargaining and learning while fighting much of the existing formal work on war models the decision to go to war as a game ending costly lottery this article relaxes this assumption by treating war as a costly process during which the states run the risk of military collapse the model also allows for uncertainty over either the cost of fighting or the distribution of power the analysis makes four contributions to the growing costly process literature i the present model provides a more general treatment of the learning process that occurs when states are uncertain about the distribution of power ii it explicitly compares the bargaining and learning processes for the two different sources of uncertainty iii it suggests a way to empirically distinguish wars arising from these two sources and iv it shows that the equilibrium dynamics of informational accounts of war may be quite sensitive to the underlying bargaining environment through which information is conveyed

the power to hurt costly conflict with completely informed states according to common explanations of war since war is costly and risky rational states have incentives to strike a bargain and avoid conflict war is then the result of private information about capabilities or resolve and incentives to misrepresent this information or inability to make credible commitments fearon 1995 this article presents another rationalist explanation which does not depend on either of these mechanisms by modeling warfare as a costly bargaining process the paper demonstrates that inefficient fighting can occur in equilibrium under very general assumptions favoring peace specifically it is assumed that peace can be supported in equilibrium and that fighting brings no benefits to either state only costs despite the fact that there exist many agreements that pareto dominate the final settlement states are unable to agree to them and fighting can occur in equilibrium the equilibrium is driven by the ability of states to impose costs on their opponent and bear costs the power to hurt the opponent establishes a range of acceptable settlements and the existence of such a range makes inefficient equilibria possible the article suggests that 1 states may fight if they believe that seeking peace means accepting an unpalatable settlement and 2 a diminished ability to hurt the enemy is a major reason for war termination historical examples are provided to illustrate these results

information marketing and pricing in the u s antiulcer drug market introduced into the united states in 1977 tagamet was the pioneer product in the class of antiulcer drugs known as h2antagonists by promoting ulcer healing through inhibiting acid secretion tagamet was able to heal ulcers and treat pre ulcer conditions pharmacologically on an outpatient basis thereby substituting for more costly hospital admissions and surgeries in 1983 another h2 antagonist called zantac entered and by early 1987 u s zantac sales surpassed those of the pioneering tagamet today there are four h2 antagonists sold in the united states tagamet zantac pepcid and axid zantac is now the world s largest selling prescription drug having estimated worldwide sales in 1994 of about 4 billion each of the four h2 antagonists is among the top 100 in world drug sales although tagamet lost u s patent protection on may 17 1994 in this paper we examine empirically the role of information in facilitating and explaining growth of the overall antiulcer drug market as well as in shaping the changing market shares of the four patented products the dissemination of information is due largely to the use of marketing channels such as visits by manufacturers representatives to physicians called detailing advertising in medical journals and most recently by direct to consumer advertising we examine these and also explore pricing policies product differentiation and orderof entry effects

the principle of convergence in wartime negotiations if war results from disagreement about relative strength then it ends when opponents learn enough about each other learning occurs when information is revealed by strategically manipulable negotiation behavior and nonmanipulable battlefield outcomes i present a model of simultaneous bargaining and fighting where both players can make offers and asymmetric information exists about the distribution of power in the markov perfect sequential equilibrium making and rejecting offers has informational value that outweighs the one provided by the battlefield however states use both sources of information to learn and settle before military victory the principle of convergence posits that warfare ceases to be useful when it loses its informational content and that belief in defeat victory is not necessary to terminate initiate hostilities thus the standard puzzle in international relations that seeks to account for prewar optimism on both sides may not be that relevant

conflict as a part of the bargaining process this paper investigates the use of conflict as a bargaining instrument it first revises the arguments explaining the role of confrontation as a source of information and its use during negotiations then it offers evidence illustrating this phenomenon by analyzing a sample of colonial and imperial wars the second part of the paper explores a bargaining model with one sided incomplete information parties can choose the scope of the confrontation they may want to engage in an absolute conflict that terminates the game or a limited conflict that only introduces delay and conveys information about the eventual outcome of the absolute one it is shown that confrontation has a double edged effect it may paradoxically open the door to agreement when the uninformed party is so optimistic that no agreement is feasible but it can also create inefficiency when agreement is possible but the informed agent has an incentive to improve her bargaining position by fighting

intimidation linking negotiation and conflict challenger demands a resource from defender in each period challenger chooses whether to attack if attacked defender chooses whether to concede the resource forever each player might be committed to ghting until victory before con ict begins defender can make nitely many offers con ict begins if challenger rejects all offers in equilibrium all offers except the last are unacceptable negotiation cannot eliminate con ict because a larger offer makes con ict increasingly attractive for challenger if negotiation fails prolonged con ict can happen in equilibrium even when uncertainty is vanishingly small we provide comparative statics regarding the probability and length of con ict

the inefficient use of power costly conflict with complete information recent work across a wide range of issues in political economy as well as in american comparative and international politics tries to explain the inefficient use of power revolutions civil wars high levels of public debt international conflict and costly policy insulation in terms of commitment problems this paper shows that a common mechanism is at work in a number of these diverse studies this common mechanism provides a more general formulation of a type of commitment problem that can arise in many different substantive settings the present analysis then formalizes this mechanism as an inefficiency condition that ensures that all of the equilibria of a stochastic game are inefficient this condition has a natural substantive interpretation large rapid changes in the actors relative power measured in terms of their minmax payoffs may cause inefficiency

war is in the error term at least since thucydides students of international relations have sought rational explanations for the advent of war rationalist explanations assume purposive action states are said to make reasoned decisions about the use of force although rationalist explanations have proven persuasive durable and offer the basis for cumulative theorizing they also imply substantial limits on what we can know about war i show that the most general rationalist explanation for war also dictates that the onset of war is theoretically indeterminate we cannot predict in individual cases whether states will go to war because war is typically the consequence of variables that are unobservable ex ante both to us as researchers and to the participants thinking probabilistically continues to offer the opportunity to assess international conflict empirically however the realization that uncertainty is necessary theoretically to motivate war is much different from recognizing that the empirical world contains a stochastic element accepting uncertainty as a necessary condition of war implies that all other variables however detailed the explanation serve to eliminate gradations of irrelevant alternatives we can progressively refine our ability to distinguish states that may use force from those that are likely to remain at peace but anticipating wars from a pool of states that appear willing to fight will remain problematic for example we may achieve considerable success in anticipating crises but our ability to predict which crises will become wars will probably prove little better than the naive predictions of random chance the need for uncertainty to account for war means that the same conditions thought to account for war must also exist among states not destined to fight otherwise states themselves will differentiate between opponents in a way that either removes the motives for war or restores uncertainty it has long been accepted that social processes possess an element of uncertainty but the centrality of uncertainty to rationalist explanations for war means that the advent of war is itself stochastic war is literally in the error term

oil and resource backed aggression a common misperception about oil politics is that it has a uniform monolithic effect on policy development this paper argues that in fact the net political effect of oil varies dramatically depending on the nature of the petrostate it shows that oil income when combined with revolutionary governments in petrostates generates strong incentives for foreign policy aggression and international conflict the aggressiveness of petro revolutionary states is shown to have consequences in both military and economic spheres of international relations militarily the aggressiveness of this type of state leads to a high rate of armed conflicts economically the aggressiveness of petro revolutionary states shapes global oil markets and international economic relations the argument is tested using statistical analysis of international conflicts and economic sanctions the policy implications are then considered focusing on the negative global impacts of dependence on oil consumption

meeting strangers and friends of friends how random are social networks we present a dynamic model of network formation where nodes find other nodes with whom to form links in two ways some are found uniformly at random while others are found by searching locally through the current structure of the network e g meeting friends of friends this combination of meeting processes results in a spectrum of features exhibited by large social networks including the presence of more high and low degree nodes than when links are formed independently at random having low distances between nodes in the network and having high clustering of links on a local level we fit the model to data from six networks and impute the relative ratio of random to network based meetings in link formation which turns out to vary dramatically across applications we show that as the random network based meeting ratio varies the resulting degree distributions can be ordered in the sense of stochastic dominance which allows us to infer how the formation process affects average utility in the network

the duration of interstate wars 1816 1985 we present a model of war duration which incorporates both realpolitik and domestic political variables we hypothesize that strategy terrain capabilities and government type among other variables will play key roles in determining the duration of war we test these hypotheses using hazard analysis and find empirical support for our key arguments we find that the realpolitik variables play a greater role than regime behavior and type in determining war duration we also find that historically on average mobilization and strategic surprise have little effect on war duration and that wars are not duration dependent

why democracies may actually be less reliable allies recent research builds on the observation that democracies have more durable alliances to argue that democracies make more reliable allies this need not be the case alliances serve as commitment devices adding ex ante credibility to states claims about ex post behavior variation in alliance durability must reflect differences in the desirability of formalizing alignments put simply democracies are most improved by formal commitments we offer two related explanations for why democracies might actually be less reliable alliance partners information costs for participating in policymaking and the advantages of organized interest groups combined with distributional incentives generated by the periodic turnover of governments may conspire to make informal commitments on the part of democracies problematic determining the net effect of democratic virtue and vice is best done empirically we test alliance reliability by focusing on intervention rather than on the duration or the number of commitments our results suggest that democracies make less reliable allies

the democratic advantage institutional foundations of financial power in international competition despite their presumed liabilities institutions associated with democracy serve as a source of power in prolonged international competition by increasing the financial resources that states can bring to bear the theory of sovereign debt suggests that a state s ability to raise money through public borrowing is enhanced when debtholders have mechanisms for sanctioning state leaders in the event of default institutions associated with liberal government provide such mechanisms all other things being equal states that possess these institutions enjoy superior access to credit and lower interest rates than do states in which the sovereign has more discretion to default unilaterally liberal states can not only raise more money from a given economic base but can also pursue tax smoothing policies that minimize economic distortions the ability to finance competition in a manner that is consistent with long term economic growth generates a significant advantage in prolonged rivalries these claims are explored by analyzing the anglo french rivalry 1688 1815 and the cold war

pharmaceutical pricing in a regulated market we compare how new pharmaceuticals are priced in the price regulated swedish market with how they are priced in the u s market as studied by lu and comanor 1998 we collect a data set consisting of all new chemical entities nces launched in sweden between 1987 and 1997 and test the same models as lu and comanor in line with their results we find that introductory prices depend on the degree of therapeutic innovation contrary to the results from the u s market swedish real prices for nces fall substantially over time for all classes of therapeutic innovation also contrary to the findings of lu and comanor we find no effect of the presence of branded substitutes on either introduction prices or price dynamics our results indicate that the price regulation discourages price competition between brandname drugs

powerful pacifists democratic states and war democracies are less likely to fight wars with each other they are also more likely to prevail in wars with autocratic states i offer an explanation of this syndrome of powerful pacifism drawn from the microeconomic theory of the state state rent seeking creates an imperialist bias in a country s foreign policy this bias is smallest in democracies where the costs to society of controlling the state are relatively low and greatest in autocracies where the costs are higher as a result of this bias autocracies will be more expansionist and in turn war prone in their relations with each other where the absence of this imperialist bias is manifest the relative pacifism of democracies appears in addition democracies constrained by their societies from earning rents will devote greater absolute resources to security enjoy greater societal support for their policies and tend to form overwhelming countercoalitions against expansionist autocracies it follows that democracies will be more likely to win wars

central banks at war war is expensive troops must be equipped and weapons must be procured when the enormous borrowing requirements of war make the sovereigns credibility problem more difficult central banks enhance a government s ability to borrow by being the sole direct purchaser of government debt the central bank increases the effective punishment that can be imposed on the government for defaulting on the marginal lender this increases lenders confidence that the government will be punished in case of default making lenders willing to purchase the debt at a lower rate of interest the sovereign dependent on the low borrowing costs offered by the central bank has an incentive to retain the bank data covering the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveal that possessing a central bank lowers the sovereign s borrowing costs particularly during times of war

peace war and the balance of power every possible relation between the distribution of power and the likelihood of war has been defended somewhere in the literature on international politics war is least likely if power is distributed equally war is least likely if power is distributed unequally and the distribution of power has no effect on the likelihood of war i try to settle this dispute by examining the effect of expectations about the outcome of war on the choice between war and negotiation i argue that each of these mutually contradictory propositions can be derived from some plausible set of premises and thus that which one is correct depends on which set of premises best describes a situation the most important factors affecting the relation between the distribution of power and the likelihood of war are 1 whether the terms of a compromise agreement that might be accepted in lieu of war affect the distribution of power between the antagonists and therefore the probability that the agreement will be enforced and 2 how many states interests will be affected by the outcome

the political economy of growth democracy and human capital democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy we argue that there are significant indirect effects of democracy on growth through public health and education where economists use life expectancy and education as proxies for human capital we expect democracy will be an important determinant of the level of public services manifested in these indicators in addition to whatever direct effect democracy may have on growth we predict an important indirect effect through public policies that condition the level of human capital in different societies we conduct statistical investigations into the direct and indirect effects of democracy on growth using a data set consisting of a 30 year panel of 128 countries we find that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on growth rather we discover that the effect of democracy is largely indirect through increased life expectancy in poor countries and increased secondary education in nonpoor countries t he relationship between democracy and economic growth has received considerable attention in recent years as yet however there is no consensus among analysts on the relationship between these two widely studied variables sound theoretical positions have been advanced suggesting that democracy is both an impediment and facilitator of growth careful quantitative tests of the relationship have produced contradictory results in our view existing studies fail to develop an adequate political theory of growth and as a result their empirical models are typically misspecified with competing arguments on both sides of the question many analysts merely add a variable for democracy to existing economic models and then look at the sign of the coefficient and its significance this is inadequate democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy we argue that there are important indirect effects of democracy on growth that are manifested through public health and education where economists typically use life expectancy and secondary school enrollment as proxies for human capital we expect that democracy will itself be an important determinant of the level of public services captured in these indicators thus in

advertising and competition in the ethical pharmaceutical industry the case of antihypertensive drugs abstract this paper uses data on the majority of name brand antihypertensive drugs marketed in the united states during 1988 93 to test the hypothesis that advertising decreases the price elasticity of demand in the pharmaceutical industry this is the first study to directly estimate the effects of drug product promotion on the price elasticity of demand in this industry we find strong evidence of an advertising effect in particular detailing efforts the salient means for product promotion in this industry systematically lower price sensitivity given the inverse relationship between elasticity of demand and price it is likely that consumers pay higher prices as a result of the advertising that occurs in this industry our findings are thus consistent with hurwitz and caves who find evidence that advertising inhibits entry into this market but in contrast to earlier research that found no anticompetitive effect

events that shook the market tick data on the standard and poor s 500 stock index s p 500 futures contract and newswire searches are used to match events to large 1 to 5 minute stock price changes sixty nine events that led to large stock price changes are identified between 1982 and 1999 53 of which are directly or indirectly related to monetary policy many large stock price changes have no events associated with them

strategic pricing of new pharmaceuticals this paper provides empirical evidence on the leading factors affecting the prices of new pharmaceuticals both at introduction and after 4 6 and 8 years most important is the extent of therapeutic advance embodied in a new product for drugs which represent important therapeutic gains launch prices can be two or three times those of existing drugs used for the same purposes while drugs that largely duplicate the actions of currently available products are typically priced at comparable levels in addition the number of branded substitutes has a substantial negative effect on launch prices which reflects the importance of competitive pressures duplicate products thereby play an important economic role in pharmaceutical markets

characteristics of demand for pharmaceutical products an examination of four cephalosporins we model demand for four cephalosporins and compute own and cross price elasticities between branded and generic versions of the four drugs we model demand as a multistage budgeting problem and we argue that such a model is appropriate to the multistage nature of the purchase of pharmaceutical products in particular the prescribing and dispensing stages we find quite high elasticities between generic substitutes and also significant elasticities between some therapeutic substitutes

testing alternative models of alliance duration 1816 1984 theory at least four models of alliance duration exist namely the capabilityaggregation security autonomy domestic politics and institutionalization models of alliances the independent tests of these models have been underspecified however as no simultaneous comparative testing of the hypotheses from these models has been conducted hypothesis alliance duration may be a function of security threats changes in national capabilities the security autonomy tradeoffs between larger and smaller states in an alliance regime type and changes in regime and the time the alliance has had to become institutionalized methods a hazard model employing time varying covariates applied to 207 alliances from 1816 to 1984 results key elements of the security autonomy and domestic politics models have effects on alliance duration as expected it does not appear however that institutionalization over time has an effect on alliance duration as alliances appear to become more likely to dissolve the longer they last additionally while one hypothesis advanced by the capability aggregation model receives some support a second variable is statistically significant in the opposite direction of the model s expectation suggesting possible problems with the model s validity

social interaction and stock market participation we propose that stock market participation is influenced by social interaction in our model any given social investor finds the market more attractive when more of his peers participate we test this theory using data from the health and retirement study and find that social households those who interact with their neighbors or attend church are substantially more likely to invest in the market than non social households controlling for wealth race education and risk tolerance moreover consistent with a peer effects story the impact of sociability is stronger in states where stock market participation rates are higher

oil and revolutionary governments fuel for international conflict oil exporting states or petrostates engage in militarized interstate disputes mids at a much higher rate on average than nonpetrostates why is this so further what explains the variation among the petrostates in adopting aggressive foreign policies and engaging in mids on that basis this article develops a theory that proposes that revolutionary petrostates have a higher propensity to launch mids than comparable nonpetrostates this theory is tested with statistical analysis using a new quantitative data set that identifies revolutionary governments in the period 1945 2001 the results show that petro revolutionary governments constitute a special threat to international peace and security this evidence of resource backed aggression challenges the conventional view of petrostates as the targets of international competition for resources

the influence of political distortions on economic performance alberto alesina is the nathaniel ropes professor of political economy and chairman of the department of economics at harvard university in this interview he discusses with brian snowdon his views on several important contemporary issues including politics and the business cycle budget deficits currency unions the european union the size of nations economic growth inequality democracy foreign aid ethnic fractionalisation and the welfare state in the us and europe

guns butter and anarchy a state in the international system implicit in realism must allocate its limited resources between satisfying its intrinsically valued ends and the means of military power i formalize this guns versus butter problem in a simple infinite horizon model in which two states must continually decide how to allocate their resources and whether to attack the other state the analysis establishes sufficient conditions to ensure the existence of an equilibrium in which neither state attacks shows that there is a strictly pareto dominant pair of peaceful equilibrium payoffs characterizes the unique peaceful markov perfect equilibrium that yields them and describes the comparative statics of the equilibrium allocations more broadly the analysis also suggests that the notion of anarchy has little if any substantive significance distinctively related to international politics and that the problem of absolute and relative gains is superfluous

military coercion in interstate crises in an international crisis states make demands backed by threats to use force although these threats can be explicit in diplomatic communications they will not generally carry much weight unless substantiated by some show of force military measures designed to convey the commitment to resort to arms if one s demands are not satisfactorily met to have an impact this commitment must be credible it must be in one s interest to carry out the threat if the opponent refuses to comply in an environment where states possess private information about their valuations capabilities or costs credibility can be established by actions that a state unwilling to fight would not want or would not dare to take military moves such as arms buildups troop mobilizations and deployments to the potential zone of operations can alter incentives in a crisis by changing one s expected payoff from the use of force these are tacit bargaining moves that can restructure the strategic context thereby creating and possibly signaling one s commitments while undermining those of the opponent how can states use the military instrument to establish commitments and how does the nature of the instrument affect their ability to communicate them credibly to their adversaries there are two distinct mechanisms for credible signaling in economic models information can be transmitted reliably by sinking costs actors burn money to reveal that they value the disputed issue even more in contrast theories of interstate crisis bargaining usually rely on choices that increase the difference between backing down and fighting actors tie their hands by running higher risks of war to reveal their resolve the first mechanism involves costs that actors pay regardless of outcome and the second involves costs that actors pay only if they fail to carry out some threat or promise

imperfect competition among informed traders we analyze competition among informed traders in the continuous time kyle 1985 model as foster and viswanathan 1996 do in discrete time we explicitly describe the unique linear equilibrium when signals are imperfectly correlated and confirm the conjecture of holden and subrahmanyam 1992 that there is no linear equilibrium when signals are perfectly correlated one result is that at some date and at all dates thereafter the market would have been more informationally efficient had there been a monopolist informed trader instead of competing traders the relatively large amount of private information remaining near the end of trading causes the market to approach complete illiquidity copyright the american finance association 2000

bargaining and fighting the impact of regime type on war onset duration and outcomes recent research suggests that democracies have advantages and disadvantages in wars democracies are more likely to win the wars they initiate and the ones in which they are targeted wars initiated by democracies are also uniformly shorter and less costly than wars initiated by nondemocracies however democracies are also less likely to continue fighting and less likely to win as war drags on democracies are also particularly likely to be targeted we present a bargaining model that reconciles these divergent findings the model explains why democracies are more likely to win but are also more likely to settle and more likely to be targeted than other types of regimes the model s explanation of these facts differs in important ways from existing explanations the model also suggests several new hypotheses relating regime type to the terms of settlement and the onset of war

asset pricing in large information networks we study asset pricing in economies with large information networks we focus on networks that are sparse and have power law degree distributions in line with empirical studies of large scale social networks our theoretical framework yields a rich set of novel asset pricing implications we derive closed form expressions for price volatility profitability and trading volume as functions of the network topology we also study agent welfare and show that the network that optimizes total welfare is typically a uniform one with an intermediate degree of connectedness

do democracies make inferior counterinsurgents reassessing democracy s impact on war outcomes and duration a core proposition from decades of research on internal wars asserts that democracies with their casualty averse publics accountable leaders and free media are uniquely prone to losing counterinsurgency coin wars yet one should question this finding for two reasons first existing studies overwhelmingly adopt no variance research designs that only examine democracies leaving them unable to assess their performance relative to autocracies second these studies do not control for confounding factors that bias causal estimates democracies for example typi cally fight wars of choice as external occupiers while most autocracies face home grown insurgencies a function in part of divergent levels of state capacity possessed by democratic and autocratic combatants this study corrects for both problems using a new dataset of insurgencies 1800 2005 and matching to test whether democra cies experience significantly higher rates of defeat and shorter wars no relationship between democracy and war outcomes or duration is found once regime type is var ied and inferential threats are addressed he who lasts the longest wins sadly with the impatience of democracies and their volatile voters committed to electoral contortions every four or five years the extremist generally triumphs over the moderate

comparing the strength of nations the political capacity of advanced societies is measured we show that politically capable governments can mobilize vast resources from the society under the stress of war but totalitarian democr

democracy and financial crisis existing scholarship attributes various political and economic advantages to democratic governance these advantages may make more democratic countries prone to financial crises democracy is characterized by constraints on executive authority accountability through free and fair elections protections for civil liberties and large winning coalitions these characteristics bring important benefits but they can also have unintended consequences that increase the likelihood of financial instability and crises using data covering the past two centuries i demonstrate a strong relationship between democracy and financial crisis onset on average democracies are about twice as likely to experience a crisis as autocracies this is an empirical regularity that is robust across a wide range of model specifications and time periods

domestic opposition and signaling in international crises this article explores the effect of domestic political competition on the escalation of international crises it combines an incomplete information model of crisis bargaining with a simple model of two party electoral choice one state has two strategic actors a government and an opposition party both of which declare openly whether they support the use of force to alter the status quo the rival state updates its beliefs and selects its strategy in response to both signals the parties payoffs depend upon a retrospective evaluation by the domestic electorate the model shows that the inclusion of a strategic opposition party decreases the ex ante probability of war by helping to reveal information about the state s preferences this finding has important implications for research on democracy and international conflict since it suggests a mechanism through which democratic states can overcome informational asymmetries which have been identified as a central obstacle to negotiation

innovation in the energy sector the role of fossil fuels and developing economies abstract this paper analyzes the effects of fossil fuel rents on r d expenditures and patent grants in the field of energy related technology we argue that an increasing share of fossil fuel rents lessens the innovation of new energy technologies we consider a sample of countries beyond the common selection of oecd members and investigate innovation efforts in the energy sector of 116 countries from 1980 to 2012 we observe the gradually growing influence of resource abundant countries on global r d expenditures and find that increasing fossil fuel rents have a negative effect on patent grants this study contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the potential effects of resource abundance more importantly it increases our understanding of innovation activities within the energy sector and further underscores the need to extend future research to countries that have not been taken into account thus far

anarchy hierarchy and the variety of international relations security relations between states vary along a continuum from anarchic alliances to hierarchic empires this continuum in turn is defined by the parties rights of residual control the state s choice between alternatives is explained in a theory of relational contracting as a function of the expected costs of opportunism which decline with relational hierarchy and governance costs which rise with relational hierarchy a comparison of early postwar relations between the united states and western europe and the soviet union and eastern europe illustrates the theory

presidential approval and macroeconomic conditions evidence from a nonlinear model abstractcontrary to previous empirical studies that find a linear link between economic conditions and presidential approval this study argues for and finds a nonlinear relationship a threshold regression is used to assess potential nonlinear relationships between macroeconomic variables and presidential popularity a quarterly data analysis for the 1960q1 2012q2 time period reveals that domestic factors prevail in shaping presidential approval most compelling is evidence of a threshold relationship involving economic conditions when unemployment is slightly over 7 its decline impacts significantly and favourably on presidential approval an effect that virtually disappears below the threshold value change in consumer sentiment affects presidential approval in a limited way while inflation shows no association at all these results combine to encourage further investigation of nonlinear processes in the nexus of economics and politics

zipf s law for cities an explanation zipf s law is a very tight constraint on the class of admissible models of local growth it says that for most countries the size distribution of cities strikingly fits a power law the number of cities with populations greater than s is proportional to 1 s suppose that at least in the upper tail all cities follow some proportional growth process this appears to be verified empirically this automatically leads their distribution to converge to zipf s law

rationalist explanations for war realist and other scholars commonly hold that rationally led states can and sometimes do fight when no peaceful bargains exist that both would prefer to war against this view i show that under very broad conditions there will exist negotiated settlements that genuinely rational states would mutually prefer to a risky and costly fight popular rationalist and realist explanations for war fail either to address or to explain adequately what would prevent leaders from locating a less costly bargain essentially just two mechanisms can resolve this puzzle on strictly rationalist terms the first turns on the fact that states have both private information about capabilities and resolve and the incentive to misrepresent it the second turns on the fact that in specific strategic contexts states may be unable credibly to commit to uphold a mutually preferable bargain historical examples suggest that both mechanisms are empirically plausible

how do investment ideas spread through social interaction evidence from a ponzi scheme a unique data set from a large ponzi scheme allows me to study word of mouth diffusion of investment information investors could join the scheme only by invitation from an existing member which allows me to observe how the idea spreads from one person to the next based on inviter invitee relationships i find that the observed social network has a scale free connectivity structure which significantly facilitates the diffusion of the investment idea and contributes to the growth and survival of the socially spreading ponzi scheme i further find that investors invest more if their inviter has comparatively higher age education and income

the hidden hand of economic coercion why do policymakers consistently employ economic sanctions even though scholars consider them an ineffective tool of statecraft game theoretic models of economic coercion suggest the success rate may be understated because of selection effects when the targeted country prefers conceding to incurring the cost of sanctions it has an incentive to acquiesce before the imposition of sanctions the bulk of successful coercion episodes should therefore end with sanctions threatened but not imposed this contradicts the recent literature on sanctions which assumes that sanctions rarely if ever work at generating significant concessions from the targeted country and are imposed for domestic or symbolic political reasons if the game theoretic argument is correct the crucial cases to study are those in which coercion is threatened but not implemented a statistical analysis of data on sanctions in pursuit of economic or regulatory goals strongly supports the gametheoretic argument these results suggest that the significance of economic coercion has been undervalued in the study of statecraft and international relations more generally

democracy war initiation and victory a study was conducted to examine the effects of nation states political institutions on state relations war fighting and selection effects explanation were compared to explain why democracies were more likely to win wars an analysis of all interstate wars between 1816 and 1982 revealed that democracies that initiate wars often win them results also suggest that domestic political structure is one factor that should not be omitted from the study of international relations copyright 1998 american political science associationrecent empirical scholarship has noted that democracies are significantly more likely to win the wars they fight than are other types of regimes though this finding refutes the general realist claim that regime type is unrelated to foreign policy behavior it also begs the important theoretical question of why democracies are more likely to win wars since different theories of foreign policy behavior provide different answers to this question discerning the real reasons would advance our theoretical understanding of foreign policy behavior scholars offer two different general arguments to explain democracies winning ways first they are perceived as intrinsically more effective at waging war than are nondemocracies hereafter termed the warfighting explanation primarily because it is easier for them to rally their society behind a war effort second as derived from several theories democracies win more often because they are more careful about deciding to initiate war hereafter termed the selection effects explanation significantly the theoretical assumptions of the latter argument are consistent with the structural explanation of the tendency for democracies not to fight one another popularly known as the democratic peace this article explores in detail why democracies are more likely to win wars specifically comparing the war fighting and selection effects explanations our empirical tests discriminate between these explanations by exploring whether democracies are more likely to win all wars in which they participate predicted by the war fighting explanation or just those they initiate predicted by the selection effects explanation our examination of all interstate wars from 1816 to 1982 finds that initiating democracies are significantly more likely to win wars than any other kind of belligerent we also find limited support for the proposition that democracies which are attacked are more likely to win wars than are other kinds of targets these results are in noteworthy contrast to previous empirical studies for three reasons we use a more complete sample account for possible interactions between democracy and initiation and include a more complete set of control variables the article has four parts the first presents the theoretical arguments relating domestic regime type to conflict behavior the second discusses hypotheses operationalization and the data set the third presents empirical results the fourth offers conclusions regime type and conflict behaviorare democracies more likely to win wars mainstream thinking during the twentieth century has occasionally doubted the ability of democracies to defend themselves especially during the 1930s and the cold war recently however scholars have examined the entirety of the post napoleonic historical record with quantitative tests and have found that when democracies fight they tend to win and their wars are of shorter duration bennett and stam 1996 lake 1992 stam 1996 what we call the war fighting and selection effects arguments have been advanced to explain this phenomenon the war fighting explanation argues that democracies simply fight wars more effectively than do other kinds of states lake 1992 developed a model of the state as rent seeker and posited three reasons for democracies superior war fighting abilities democracies extract fewer rents from society hence are wealthier and devote more resources to security they form overwhelming countercoalitions against aggressors democratic governments can extract higher levels of support from society for a war effort we discuss each of these arguments in turn we believe the last is the most persuasive the rent seeking argument has logical shortcomings the model assumes that democracies are wealthier because they extract fewer rents from their society than do autocratic states leading to greater wealth which in turn means more american political science review june 1998 v92 n2 p377 13 page 1 reprinted with permission additional copying is prohibited

information linkages and correlated trading in a market with informationally connected traders the dynamics of volume price informativeness price volatility and liquidity are severely affected by the information linkages every trader experiences with his peers we show that in the presence of information linkages among traders volume and price informativeness increase moreover we find that information linkages improve or damage market depth and lower or boost the traders profits according to whether these linkages convey positively or negatively correlated signals finally our model predicts patterns of trade correlation consistent with those identified in the empirical literature trades generated by neighbor traders are positively correlated and trades generated by distant traders are negatively correlated

does regulation drive out competition in pharmaceutical markets abstract most countries regulate pharmaceutical prices either directly or indirectly on the assumption that competition is at best weak in this industry this paper tests the hypothesis that regulation of manufacturer prices and retail pharmacy margins undermines price competition we use data from seven countries for 1992 to examine price competition between generic competitors different manufacturers of the same compound and therapeutic substitutes similar compounds under different regulatory regimes we find that price competition between generic competitors is significant in unregulated or less regulated markets united states united kingdom canada and germany but that regulation undermines generic competition in strict regulatory systems france italy and japan regulation of retail pharmacy further constrains competition in france germany and italy regulation thus undermines the potential for significant savings on off patent drugs which account for a large and growing share of drug

volatility persistence in stock market by using the unique dataset that consists of all brokers daily trading information i propose an empirical methodology to construct a granger causality financial network to study the relationship between dynamics of volatility and information diffusion in a stock market the financial network i proposed not only provides a new way to describe mutual interconnectedness of brokers in the market but the empirical results also show the financial network density is positively correlated to the realized volatility of the market

the origins of central banking solutions to the free rider problem certain domestic institutions are sources of international power by way of their abilities to encourage investment and to mobilize social resources in wartime for example states with democratic institutions almost always win the wars they e ght a regularity known as the democratic advantage 1 this result is intriguing since it rests on intuition about the effects of military competition on domestic institutions rivalry among states may put pressure on sovereigns to provide the political foundations for secure markets in order to enlarge future military capabilities in this article i address the role of war in inducing domestic institutions that allowed governments to credibly commit to promises to pay their debts a probable source of democracies edge in war rather than investigate the entire range of protections affected by democratic institutions a life s endeavor as the work of douglass north attests i focus on a single e nancial element of the reforms the innovation of central banking britain s superior e nancial economic and military performance after 1689 rested in large part on the establishment of the bank of england 2 the central bank provided a commitment technology that improved the government s ability to borrow a need impelled by intense military competition 3 my motivation derives from puzzles concerning the origins and the diffusion of credibility enhancing institutions like central banks institutions resolve collective action problems but institutions themselves are public goods meaning that their origins are subject to the same dilemmas they are meant to resolve 4 what then explains the incentives of self interested and free riding individuals to contribute to

introduction unipolarity state behavior and systemic consequences the united states emerged from the 1990s as an unrivaled global unipolar state this extraordinary imbalance has triggered global debate governments and peoples around the world are struggling to understand to how an american centered unipolar system operates and to respond to it what is the character of domination in a unipolar distribution to what extent can a unipolar state translate its formidable capabilities into meaningful influence will a unipolar world be built around rules and institutions or be based more on the unilateral exercise of unipolar power scholars too are asking these basic questions about unipolarity and international relations theory the individual contributions develop hypotheses and explore the impact of unipolarity on the behavior of the dominant state on the reactions of other states and on the properties of the international system collectively they find that unipolarity does have a profound impact on international politics international relations under conditions of unipolarity force a rethinking of conventional and received understandings about the operation of the balance of power the meaning of alliance partnerships the logic of international economic cooperation the relationship between power and legitimacy and the behavior of satisfied and revisionist states

domestic audience costs in international relations an experimental approach what makes international threats credible recent theories point to domestic audience costs the domestic price a leader would pay for making foreign threats and then backing down this article provides the first direct evidence of audi ence costs the analysis based on experiments embedded in public opinion surveys shows that audience costs exist across a wide range of conditions and increase with the level of escalation the costs are evident throughout the population and espe cially among politically active citizens who have the greatest potential to shape government policy finally preliminary evidence suggests that audience costs arise because citizens care about the international reputation of the country or leader these findings help identify how and under what conditions domestic audiences make commitments credible at the same time they demonstrate the promise of using ex periments to answer previously intractable questions in the field of international relations

rising hazards an underlying dynamic of parliamentary government this paper undertakes a quantitative examination of underlying rates of government termination in west european parliamentary systems most previous research assumed that these rates remain constant over the lifetimes of governments but this assumption has never been subjected to careful scrutiny a variety of tests is performed on a new data set that covers 16 systems over the 1945 89 period each of which points to a general tendency for the rate of termination or hazard rate to increase with the length of time a government remains in power this information is incorporated into an empirical model of government survival that also includes ideological policy differences within governments and the impact of economic trends

regulation and competition in the taiwanese pharmaceutical market under national health insurance this article investigates the determinants of the prices of pharmaceuticals and their impact on the demand for prescription drugs in the context of taiwan s pharmaceutical market where medical providers earn profit directly from prescribing and dispensing drugs based on product level data we find evidence that the profit seeking behavior of the medical providers in the prescription drug market transfers the force of competition from the unregulated wholesale market to the regulated retail market and hence market competition still plays an important role in the determination of the regulated price we also find that the profit seeking behavior plays a similar role to advertising in that it increases the brand loyalty and hence lowers price elasticity an important implication of our study is that the institutional features in the pharmaceutical market matter in shaping the nature of pharmaceutical competition and the responsiveness of pharmaceutical consumption with respect to changes in price

the kantian peace the pacific benefits of democracy interdependence and international organizations 1885 1992 the authors test kantian and realist theories of interstate conflict using data extending over more than a century treating those theories as complementary rather than competing as the classical liberals believed democracy economic interdependence and international organizations have strong and statistically significant effects on reducing the probability that states will be involved in militarized disputes moreover the benefits are not limited to the cold war era some realist influences notably distance and power predominance also reduce the likelihood of interstate conflict the character of the international system too affects the probability of dyadic disputes the consequences of having a strong hegemonic power vary but high levels of democracy and interdependence in the international system reduce the probability of conflict for all dyads not just for those that are democratic or dependent on trade

location matters an examination of trading profits the electronic trading system xetra of the german security exchange provides a unique data source on the equity trades of 756 professional traders located in 23 different cities and eight european countries we explore informational asymmetries across the trader population traders located outside germany in non german speaking cities show lower proprietary trading profit their underperformance is not only statistically significant it is also of economically significant magnitude and occurs for the 11 largest german blue chip stocks we also examine whether a trader location in frankfurt as the financial center or local proximity of the trader to the corporate headquarters of the traded stock or affiliation with a large financial institution results in superior trading performance the data provide no evidence for a financial center advantage or of increasing institutional scale economies in proprietary trading however we find evidence for an information advantage due to corporate headquarters proximity for high frequency intraday trading

a strategic model of social and economic networks we study the stability and efficiency of social and economic networks when self interested individuals can form or sever links first for two stylized models we characterize the stable and efficient networks there does not always exist a stable network that is efficient next we show that this tension persists generally to assure that there exists a stable network that is efficient one is forced to allocate resources to nodes that are not responsible for any of the production we characterize one such allocation rule the equal split rule and another rule that arises naturally from bargaining of the players

the impact of leadership turnover on trading relations between states we test how domestic political institutions moderate the effect of lead ership turnover on relations between states deriving hypotheses from recent theo retical work bueno de mesquita et al and mcgillivray and smith we examine how leader change affects trading relations between states using dyadic trade data con sistent with hypotheses we find that large winning coalition systems such as democ racies are relatively immune from the vagaries of leadership change in such systems trade remains relatively constant whether leader change occurs or not in contrast when winning coalition size is small as in autocratic states leadership change pro foundly alters relations causing a decline in trade finally we examine instances of poor relations measured by a significant decline in trade compared to historical lev els as predicted instances of poor relations are less common between pairs of democ racies than other dyadic pairings further leadership turnover in autocratic systems restores trading relations between states the effect of leadership change in democ racies is much less pronounced since first drafting this article the united states has invaded iraq and deposed its leader saddam hussein for more than a decade iraq experienced harsh economic sanctions with hussein s removal these sanctions have been lifted and iraq is in the processes of being reinstated into the international community although it was the iraqi people who bore the costs of the sanctions the sanctions were aimed at hussein s regime with hussein removed the prospects for improved relations between iraq and western states look strong while iraq offers an extreme example this article assesses how the turnover of leaders affects relations between states as measured by trade flows in partic ular drawing on recent theoretical developments we examine how domestic insti tutions and leadership turnover affect dyadic trade flows consistent with the theoretical arguments we find that trade flows between states depend on the inter action of institutions and leader turnover

pharmaceuticals in u s health care determinants of quantity and price the u s pharmaceutical industry has again become the focus of considerable controversy in understanding the economics underlying this industry distinctions between short medium and long run costs are critical as is that between economic and accounting costs consumers heterogeneous valuations create strong incentives for non uniform pricing and targeted marketing the conflict between static efficiency price new drugs low near short run marginal cost and dynamic efficiency price new drugs high maintain incentives for innovation is deep and enduring this trade off is becoming more severe as the relative costs of bringing new drugs to market have increased sharply

hedging familiarity and portfolio choice we exploit the restrictions of intertemporal portfolio choice in the presence of non nancial income risk to design and implement tests of hedging that use the information contained in the actual portfolio of the investor we use a unique dataset of swedish investors with information broken down at the investor level and into various components of wealth investor income tax positions and investor demographic characteristics portfolio holdings are identi ed at the stock level we show that investors do not engage in hedging but invest in stocks closely related to their non nancial income we explain this with familiarity that is the tendency to concentrate holdings in stocks with which the investor is familiar in terms of geographical or professional proximity or that he has held for a long period we show that familiarity is not a behavioral bias but is information driven familiarity based investment allows investors to earn higher returns than they would have otherwise earned if they had hedged

regime type the fate of leaders and war we propose and test a formal model of war and domestic politics building on recent evidence on the relationship between regime type the effect of war on the probability of losing office and the consequences of losing office the less the outcome of international interaction affects a leader s tenure and the less punitive are the consequences of losing office the more a leader is willing to make concessions to strike a peaceful bargain we demonstrate that our theory successfully predicts war involvement among nondemocratic regime types moreover our theory offers an intuitive explanation for the democratic peace compared to nondemocratic leaders the tenure of democratic leaders depends relatively little on the war outcome and democratic leaders fare relatively well after losing office thus democratic leaders should be more willing and able to avoid war especially with other democrats

the foreign imposition of domestic institutions international relations research has paid little attention to why states often spend precious resources building and maintaining domestic institutions in other states i identify 198 cases of forcible domestic institutional promotion the most costly form of such interventions between 1555 and 2000 i note several patterns in the data these interventions come in three historical clusters they are carried out by states of several regime types states engage in the practice repeatedly target states tend to be undergoing internal instability states tend to promote their own institutions and targets tend to be of strategic importance the most intensive periods of promotion coincide with high transnational ideological tension and high international insecurity i argue that these two conditions interact forcible promotion is most likely when great powers 1 need to expand their power and 2 find that by imposing on in smaller states those institutions most likely to keep their ideological confreres in power they can bring those states under their influence although in periods of high insecurity domestic variables alone may account for institutional impositions such impositions may nonetheless extend the promoting states influence and thereby alter the balance of international power

the strategic sources of foreign policy substitution while a growing body of work provides empirical support for the notion that political leaders substitute foreign policies depending on a variety of domestic political and economic conditions little work examines the underlying strategic causes of substitution this article argues that foreign states behave strategically in order to a avoid becoming the targets of domestically troubled executives or b to take advantage of the domestic trouble another state endures such strategic interaction delimits the set of foreign policies reasonably available to leaders in trouble at home thus producing the impetus for policy substitution this article develops a theoretical model of strategic behavior and policy substitution and reports empirical results of a multivariate probit model

international systems and domestic politics linking complex interactions with empirical models in international relations following older debates in international relations literature concerning the relative importance of domestic versus systemic factors newer debates emphasize interdependence among states and the complex interactions between systemic and domestic factors as globalization and democratization advance theories and empirical models of international politics have become more complicated we present a systematic theoretical categorization of relationships between domestic and systemic variables we use this categorization so that scholars can match their theory to the appropriate empirical model and assess the degree to which systemic factors affect their arguments we also present two advances at the frontier of these empirical models in one we combine hierarchical models of moderating relationships with spatial models of interdependence among units within a system in the other we provide a model for analyzing spatial interdependence that varies over time this enables us to examine how the level of interdependence among units has evolved we illustrate our categorization and new models by revisiting the recent international political economy ipe debate over the relationship between trade policy and regime type in developing countries

diversifying away the risk of war and cross border political crisis this paper investigates the behavior of crude oil prices government bonds and stock market indices around outbreaks of severe international crises and wars using a constant mean return event study we show that these events are associated with positive and significant abnormal returns on oil and bonds which means that these two asset classes can potentially shelter shareholders from plummeting equity values during international crises a formal safe haven analysis confirms this insight such price movements may reflect a reallocation of funds across asset classes in response to the events as well as shifts in the demand for oil due to precautionary speculative and military motives we also calculate the weights for optimal portfolios which could provide insurance against conflict risk

information aggregation in a noisy rational expectations economy abstract this paper analyzes a general equilibrium model of a competitive security market in which traders possess independent pieces of information about the return of a risky asset each trader conditions his estimate of the return both on his own private source of information and price which in equilibrium serves as a noisy aggregator of the total information observed by all traders a closed form characterization of the rational expectations equilibrium is presented a counter example to the existence of fully revealing equilibrium is developed