BayesSPsurv: An R Package to Estimate Bayesian (Spatial) Split-Population Survival Models

Survival data often include a fraction of units that are susceptible to an event of interest as well as a fraction of “immune” units. In many applications, spatial clustering in unobserved risk factors across nearby units can also affect their survival rates and odds of becoming immune. To address these methodological challenges, this article introduces our BayesSPsurv R-package, which fits parametric Bayesian Spatial split-population survival (cure) models that can account for spatial autocorrelation in both subpopulations of the user \u27s time-to-event data. Spatial autocorrelation is modeled with spatially weighted frailties, which are estimated using a conditionally autoregressive prior. The user can also fit parametric cure models with or without nonspatial i.i.d. frailties, and each model can incorporate time-varying covariates. BayesSPsurv also includes various functions to conduct pre-estimation spatial autocorrelation tests, visualize results, and assess model performance, all of which are illustrated using data on post-civil war peace survival

Replication data for: Why Political Power-Sharing Agreements Lead to Enduring Peaceful Resolution of Some Civil Wars, But Not Others?

This paper develops a bargaining model that explains why political power-sharing agreements lead to peaceful resolution of civil wars between governments and insurgents in some cases, but not others. The model predicts that if the civil war ends in a military stalemate, the government uses its offer of a political power-sharing agreement to the insurgents as a tool to misrepresent private information about its military capacity and defeat the insurgency. This exacerbates commitment problems, increases the degree of support that insurgent leaders receive from their civilian supporters and consequently increases the likelihood of recurrence of civil war. Conversely, the model shows that when the war ends in a decisive military victory for the government or the insurgents, the offer of a political power-sharing agreement reduces the degree of support that insurgent leaders get from their civilian supporters and increases the costs of fighting for the insurgents. Hence, after a decisive military victory insurgents have incentives to accept the political power-sharing agreement and not revert to fighting. Results from Cox Proportional Hazard models estimated on a data set of 111 civil wars (1944–1999) provide robust statistical support for the model's predictions

Replication data for: A Mixture Model for Middle-category Inflation in Ordered Survey Responses

This file contains all of the materials needed for replicating all of the analyses in the paper. It includes the raw data, the code for the estimators and figures, and the supplemental data used in the analysis with code for replicating the analyses

Monetary Institutions, Partisanship, and Inflation Targeting

Since 1989, twenty-five countries have adopted a monetary policy rule known as inflation targeting (IT), in which the central bank commits to using monetary policy solely for the purpose of meeting a publicly announced numerical inflation target within a particular time frame. In contrast, many other countries continue to conduct monetary policy without a transparent nominal anchor. The emergence of IT has been almost completely ignored by political scientists, who instead have focused exclusively on central bank independence and fixed exchange rates as strategies for maintaining price stability. We construct a simple model that demonstrates that countries are more likely to adopt IT when there is a conformity of preferences for low-inflation monetary policy between the government and the central bank. More specifically, the combination of a right-leaning government and a central bank without bank regulatory authority is likely to be associated with the adoption of IT. Results from a spatial autoregressive probit model estimated on a time-series cross-sectional data set of seventy-eight countries between 1987 and 2003 provide strong statistical support for our argument. The model controls for international diffusion from neighboring countries by accounting for spatial dependence in the dependent variable, but our results indicate that domestic interests and institutions rather than the influence of neighboring countries drive the adoption of IT.We thank David Bearce, Bill Bernhard, Cristina Bodea, Lawrence Broz, Bill Clark, Nate Jensen, Phil Keefer, David Leblang, Eric Reinhardt, Shanker Satyanath, Jerome Vandenbussche, Robert Walker, Tom Willett, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Sergio Bejar and Jon Bischof for research assistance. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the first annual International Political Economy Society meeting, the 11th annual conference of the International Society for New Institutional Economics, and the 2007 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association; we thank the conference participants for their feedback and suggestions. Mukherjee thanks the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University for research support.

The IMF, Domestic Public Sector Banks, and Currency Crises in Developing States

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Time horizons matter: the hazard rate of coalition governments and the size of government

Political Economy (P48), Government Expenditure (H50), Econometric and Statistical Methods (C1),

Droughts, Land Appropriation, and Rebel Violence in The Developing World

Scholars note that rebel atrocities against civilians often arise within rural areas in the developing world. This characterization is not far-fetched, and recent data show that rebel atrocities do predominately occur within rural agricultural regions. Yet, the frequency of such incidents also varies substantially across different agricultural regions and years. What accounts for this observed variation in rebel-perpetrated atrocities against civilians within agricultural areas in developing countries? We develop a formal model to address this question, which contends that severe droughts can decrease food availability, prompting civilians to allocate food for immediate consumption and become increasingly willing to defend their diminishing supplies against rebels. This leads rebels to preempt the civilians' defensive efforts by committing atrocities, which forcibly separate civilians from their lands and food stockpiles. In empirically testing this hypothesis at the sub-national level across the developing world, we find robust support for our game-theoretic model's predictions

Bayesian Spatial Split-Population Survival Model with Applications to Democratic Regime Failure and Civil War Recurrence

The underlying risk factors associated with the duration and termination of biological, sociological, economic, or political processes often exhibit spatial clustering. However, existing nonspatial survival models, including those that account for “immune” and “at-risk” subpopulations, assume that these baseline risks are spatially independent, leading to inaccurate inferences in split-population survival settings. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian spatial split-population survival model that addresses these methodological challenges by accounting for spatial autocorrelation among units in terms of their probability of becoming immune and their survival rates. Monte Carlo experiments demonstrate that, unlike nonspatial models, this spatial model provides accurate parameter estimates in the presence of spatial autocorrelation. Applying our spatial model to data from published studies on authoritarian reversals and civil war recurrence reveals that accounting for spatial autocorrelation in split-population models leads to new empirical insights, reflecting the need to theoretically and statistically account for space and non-failure inflation in applied research