Trade openness and the settlement of domestic disputes in the shadow of the future

© 2015 University of Venice. We explore the severity of an ongoing dispute over a productive resource within a country that participates in world trade. In addition to arming, the contending groups in our setting choose either to engage in destructive conflict or to settle their dispute peacefully. Our central objective is to characterize the conditions under which the dispute might be resolved peacefully instead of violently. The analysis underscores the intuitive roles played by the destructiveness of open conflict and the salience of the future that have been identified in the previous literature, but it also provides some novel insights into how world prices and trade openness matter. Among other things, we find that, given conflict's destructive effects and time preferences, settlement is most likely to be supported as a stable equilibrium when the "traditional" gains from trade are largest. However, there also exist circumstances under which increased trade openness can induce destructive conflict

The causes and consequences of leveraged buyouts

Leveraged buyouts

The FOMC in 1988: uncertainty's effects on monetary policy

Federal Open Market Committee ; Monetary policy

The FOMC in 1989: walking a tightrope

Federal Open Market Committee

The economic consequences of reducing military spending

Defense contracts ; Economic policy

What is an "acceptable" rate of inflation?--a review of the issues

Inflation (Finance)

On the Stability of Group Formation: Managing the Conflict Within

This paper develops a positive analysis of stable group formation, highlighting the role of conflict management within groups. The analysis is based on a model of sequential conflict, starting with a "winner- take-all" contest for control of some resource. When a group forms, members pool their efforts in that contest and, if successful, apply the resource to a joint production process. While reducing the severity of conflict over the contestable resource relative to the case of individual conflict, the formation of groups adds another layer of conflict---that is, one between the members of the winning group over the distribution of their joint product. The effectiveness of conflict management in enabling groups to resolve this second layer of conflict in more "peaceful" ways involving less "social waste" has some important implications for the equilibrium structure of groups as well as for the allocation of resources.Endogenous group formation, competitive appropriation, conflict management.

Strategic considerations in monetary policy with private information: can secrecy be avoided?

Monetary policy

Trends in the size of the nation's homeless population during the 1980s: A surprising result

There are good national estimates of the number of homeless people in shelters in 1984, 1988, and 1990, but only in 1987 is there a reliable estimate of the number of people sleeping in streets. The large increase in the sheltered homeless population between 1984 and 1987-88 could reflect a shift of the homeless from street to shelters rather than a growth in total homelessness. Data from a number of local studies of homeless populations in U.S. cities in the 1980s have made it possible to estimate the ratio of the number of homeless on the street to the number of homeless in shelters and thereby to estimate the size of the national homeless population over this period with some degree of accuracy. Our estimates indicate that the expansion of shelters over the decade did have the effect of reducing the proportion of the homeless living on the street. Still, when we combine the estimated ratios with the estimates of the shelter population in 1984, 1987, 1988, and 1990, we find that homelessness about doubled between 1984 and 1987. We also find that homelessness declined between 1987 and 1990. At its peak, the number of people literally homeless on any given night was less than 400,000. Finally, our results also provide evidence that pure enumerations or censuses of the homeless population lead to undercounts. Both sample censuses and retrospective interview studies provide more complete counts.