Reports

Strategic Mass Killings

Esteban, Joan; Morelli, Massimo; Rohner, Dominic

We provide a model of conflict and mass killing decisions, to identify the key variables and situations that make mass killings more likely to occur. We predict that mass killings are most likely in countries with large amounts of natural resources, institutional constraints regarding rent sharing, and low productivity of labor in other sectors. The role of resources like oil, gas and diamonds and other key determinants of mass killings is confirmed by our empirical results based on country level as well as ethnic group level analysis.

Files

More About This Work

Academic Units
Economics
Publisher
Department of Economics, Columbia University
Series
Department of Economics Discussion Papers, 1213-03
Published Here
November 7, 2012