Abstract not found

What do we know about extended families and kinship networks? What gaps in our knowledge most need to be filled? How can we best organize current work and identify priorities for future research? These questions are important for several reasons: households in developing countries depend on friends and relatives for their livelihood and sometimes their survival; help exchanged within extended families and kin networks affects the distribution of economic well-being, and this private assistance and exchange can interact with public income redistribution. Yet despite rapid recent progress there remain significant deficiencies in our understanding of the economics of extended families. Researchers confront a large and sometimes bewildering array of findings. We review and assess this literature by starting with an emphasis on standard economic concerns, most notably the possible interaction between government-provided social insurance and private kinship networks. Our review of the evidence suggests the specter of complete “crowding out,” whereby introduction or expansion of public transfers merely supplants private transfers, is exceedingly remote, though not impossible. However, numerous studies do suggest partial—but nonetheless substantial—crowding out, on the order of a 20-to-30-cent reduction in private transfers per dollar increase in public transfers. But the range of estimated effects is exceedingly wide, with many studies suggesting little private transfer response at all.

Prepared for a special issue of Public Choice on the Political Economy of Terrorism, edited by Charles Rowley. Abstract: This paper challenges conventional views of violent religious extremism, particularly those that emphasize militant theology. We offer an alternative analysis that helps explain the persistent demand for religion, the different types of religious that naturally arise, and the special attributes of the “sectarian ” type. Sects are adept at producing club goods – both spiritual and material. Where governments and economies function poorly, sects often become major suppliers of social services, political action, and coercive force. Their success as providers is much more due to the advantages of their organizational structure than it is to their theology. Religious militancy is most effectively controlled through a combination of policies that raise the direct costs of violence, foster religious competition, improve social services, and encourage private enterprise.

This paper develops a dynamical model of terrorism. We consider the population in a given region as being made up of three primary components: terrorists, those susceptible to both terrorist and pacifist propaganda, and nonsusceptibles, or pacifists. The dynamical behavior of these three populations is studied using a model that incorporates the effects of both direct military/police intervention to reduce the terrorist population, and nonviolent, persuasive intervention to influence the susceptibles to become pacifists. The paper proposes a new paradigm for studying terrorism, and looks at the long-term dynamical evolution in time of these three population components when such interventions are carried out. Many important features—some intuitive, others not nearly so—of the nature of terrorism emerge from the dynamical model proposed, and they lead to several important policy implications for the management of terrorism. The different circumstances in which nonviolent intervention and/or military/police intervention may be beneficial, and the specific conditions under which each mode of intervention, or a combination of both, may be useful, are obtained. The novelty of the model presented herein is that it deals with the time evolution of terrorist activity. It appears to be one of the few models that can be tested, evaluated, and improved upon, through the use of actual field data. Copyright © 2006 Firdaus Udwadia et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 1.

I propose a new concept of the evolutionary psychological imagination, to replace C. Wright Mills ’ half-century-old notion of the sociological imagination, as a way to link personal experiences with wider social phenomena. To illustrate, I discuss how one’s difficulty in dating might be connected to the current world war, and how the evolutionary psychological imagination sometimes allows us to see things that few others do.

In the proposed poster presentation I will discuss some active participatory class techniques that I used in one of my classes. I will also provide examples from student papers, pictures of their projects and student reactions to the assignments and the content of the course. Poster Proposal The traditional approach to teaching economics usually involves solving problems, transfer of knowledge through lectures and testing students ’ technical and content knowledge by assigning them problems and exams. In the upper division undergraduate class on Economics of Conflict that I taught in Spring 2008, I used a combination of active, participatory and more traditional approaches. The choice of teaching techniques was driven by the class content. The course, Economics of Conflict, covered the causes, effects and solutions to armed conflicts around the world. We focused on two types of such conflicts: civil wars and terrorism. Many topics are emotionally driven and students may have pre-conceived notions. For example, many believe that civil wars are primarily driven by ethnic differences among groups and that terrorists are uneducated individuals from poor families, who have low opportunity cost of their time. Both

Despite a series of unprecedented disasters that have unfolded in the past decades, there has been little economic analysis about corporate demand for catastrophe insurance. Using a unique dataset of 1,808 large U.S. corporations, this study provides the first empirical analysis that compares corporate demand for standard property insurance and for catastrophe coverage (here, terrorism) using a demand-supply system equation. The main finding of this study is that corporate demand for catastrophe insurance is more price inelastic than for non-catastrophe insurance. This result differs from the existing findings on homeowners ’ demand for catastrophe insurance which has been shown to be price elastic. Further, larger companies are more likely to have some catastrophe coverage and a higher solvency ratio reduces demand for such coverage. Our results further suggest that free federal reinsurance under TRIA has led insurers to be less cautious about risk diversification in the case of terrorism risk than they are on the property side.

JEL No. H56,O10,O40,C80 Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. The past decade has witnessed an explosion of research into the causes and consequences of civil wars, belatedly bringing the topic into the economics mainstream. This article critically reviews this interdisciplinary literature and charts productive paths forward. Formal theory has focused on a central puzzle: why do civil wars occur at all when, given the high costs of war, groups have every incentive to reach an agreement that avoids fighting? Explanations have focused on information asymmetries and the inability to sign binding contracts in the absence of the rule of law. Economic theory has made less progress, however, on the thornier (but equally important) problems of why armed groups form and cohere, and why individuals

This essay discusses several issues involving the theory of post-conflict reconstruction, and suggests that the concepts of reconstruction and of economic development be carefully kept apart. It explores the question of what moral and legal obligations to reconstruction the occupiers incur. Using Iraq as a case study it presents two scenarios for reconstruction: a ‘triage’ approach which relies heavily on prioritization and recognition of inherent limitations, and a ‘scattergun ’ approach, exemplified by current efforts in Iraq. The latter, the essay concludes, is ineffective as a tool for reconstruction. Reconstruction has its own intrinsic merits, but using it to win the ‘hearts and minds ’ of a population in order to gain support for the occupiers is unlikely to succeed.

We model the effect of Protestant vs. Catholic denomination in an economic theory of suicide, accounting for differences in religious-community integration, views about man’s impact on God’s grace, and the possibility of confessing sins. We test the theory using a unique micro-regional dataset of 452 counties in 19 th-century Prussia, when religiousness was still pervasive. Our instrumental-variable model exploits the concentric dispersion of Protestantism around Wittenberg to circumvent selectivity bias. Protestantism had a substantial positive effect on suicide in 1816-21 and 1869-71. We address issues of bias from mental illness, misreporting, weather conditions, within-county heterogeneity, religious concentration, and gender composition.