Research

One out of three women views intimate partner violence (IPV) as justified, and the rates of IPV approval are significantly higher among women than men. Beyond societal norms and family upbringing, what other factors explain IPV approval among women? We propose a theory that focuses on women's experiences with ‘toxic husbands’ who display authoritarian attitudes and high proclivity to aggression. Our model highlights a novel mechanism whereby experiencing threatening behavior leads women to adopt fear-induced submission when the perceived risks are high and outside options are low, with IPV approval being a manifestation of internalized submission. Leveraging a population-level natural experiment created by the mandatory conscription system, the military deployment lottery, and the long-running civil conflict in Turkey as an exogenous influence on husband type, we test various predictions from our theory. We find that women whose husbands served in conflict zones are more approving of IPV, even when they have not experienced any. Further evidence supports the mechanism we propose with important implications for the fight against domestic violence.

This paper introduces Ancestral Composition Distance (ACD); a bilateral measure of how similarly two countries assemble their populations from a common set of ancestral clusters. Each cluster contains countries whose native populations were culturally close around 1500. Across a global sample of country dyads (involving 163 countries), greater ancestral composition distance is systematically associated with greater contemporary cultural distance and human capital gap. More ancestrally distant countries also exhibit larger differences in income, human development, institutional characteristics, and foreign-policy positions, while trading less and exchanging fewer migrants. These relationships survive an extensive set of geographic, historical, institutional, genetic, linguistic, and religious controls, indicating that ACD captures a dimension of bilateral relatedness not summarized by standard measures. Decomposing ACD into differences already present in 1500 and differences that emerged due to post-Columbian population movements, we show that pairs whose ancestral compositions converged after 1500 are culturally closer today, conditional on their initial ancestral separation. All these results are robust to alternative ways to group countries into pre-1500 cultural clusters. We view ACD both as a useful measure for understanding contemporary cultural differences as well as a historically determined bilateral resistance term that complements conventional measures of geography, shared history, and population relatedness.

Employers that hire across borders must judge how much of a record produced abroad will carry over. We study how this portability depends on the distance a move adds from the worker’s home, using professional football as a laboratory in which one algorithm rates the performance of every worker in 80 countries on a common scale. Comparing workers who join the same destination in the same season and role, we find that leaving home lowers performance by 14.7 to 14.8 percent of a standard deviation among peers and returning home raises it by 14.2 to 15.0 percent. Beyond this step at the home border, each standard deviation of distance lowers performance by 1.6 to 3.1 percent among moves between two foreign countries, also among workers who leave the same league, whether distance is measured by social connectedness, cultural values or geography. Across all moves, each standard deviation of distance a move adds from home lowers performance by 3.5 to 5.1 percent. The decline appears at once, follows no change before the move and does not fade, and nearly two thirds of it remains when the strength of the origin and the destination is held fixed. Employers also use distant hires less. The decline is largest in the role that depends most on coordination with colleagues and smaller where compatriots or a manager from home ease integration. Distance from home is thus an observable source of risk to the portability of performance in international hiring.

For two decades, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey sustained its electoral performance at the local level. We offer and test a new mechanism that contributed to the party's success in municipal elections. We argue that patronage links with religious civil society served as an important instrument of building and sustaining local incumbency advantage. Employing a close-election regression discontinuity design, we address two questions: To what extent did religious associations proliferate in AKP-controlled municipalities? Was this civil society penetration instrumental for the party’s electoral success? Employing a close-election regression discontinuity design (RDD), we show that in districts with a small-margin AKP victory in the 2014 elections, the number of religious associations in 2016 were significantly higher than in districts where AKP lost narrowly. We also find that the AKP incumbency in 2014 in closely contested districts increased the party’s vote share in the next local elections. Our results empirically demonstrate a new channel of local incumbency advantage. Moreover, we highlight the role of civil society as an agent of clientelistic exchange in competitive authoritarian regimes.

Can the economic legacy of highly skilled groups persist long after they were uprooted from their homelands? To answer this question, we study long-term sub-national development in Turkey after the mass expulsions of the Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Since these events led to an almost complete and permanent removal of both communities from Turkey within a short time period, they provide a unique quasi-natural experiment that rules out any direct minority influence on development in the post-expulsion period. By exploiting local variations in historical minority population shares and community buildings across modern districts and villages/neighborhoods within each district, we document a sizable Armenian and Greek legacy effect on contemporary measures of economic development. We argue that this persistent influence is grounded on the significant contribution of Armenian and Greek communities to human capital accumulation among Muslims. We show evidence that inter-group transfers of skills and knowledge were instrumental in this process, leading to greater human capital among Muslims in minority regions both in the past and today.

Hezbollah, a Shia Islamist political party and militant group based in Lebanon, is believed to receive a significant amount of informal funding from Iran. In this paper, we evaluate whether this funding has had any economically meaningful effect on subnational development in Lebanon. Since the amount of funding is not observed, we use Iranian oil rents and the intensity of sanctions against Iran as plausibly exogenous drivers of transfers to Hezbollah. Then, we leverage the well-established sectarian bias in Hezbollah’s spending to obtain conservative estimates of the direct effect of funding to Hezbollah. Studying the 1993–2010 period, we find a positive and economically significant relationship between Iranian oil windfalls and nighttime lights. This effect is significantly stronger in areas with greater concentration of Shia population. Also, nighttime lights are relatively lower in Shia areas than elsewhere during periods when sanctions against Iran intensified. These novel results attest to the non-negligible developmental effects of informal aid as well as how economic sanctions against donors might offset such effects.

Offering employment in the public sector in exchange for electoral support (patronage politics) and vote-buying are clientelistic practices frequently used by political machines. In the literature, these practices are typically studied in isolation. In this paper, we study how the interaction between these two practices (as opposed to having just one tool) affects economic development. We present a theoretical model of political competition, where, before the election, the incumbent chooses the level of state investment that can improve productivity in the private sector. This decision affects the income levels of employees in the private sector, and, thereby, the costs and effectiveness of vote-buying and patronage. We show that when the politician can use both clientelistic instruments simultaneously, his opportunity cost for clientelism in terms of foregone future taxes declines. As a result, the equilibrium amount of public investment is typically lower when both tools are available than otherwise.

This research advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that interpersonal population diversity, rather than fractionalization or polarization across ethnic groups, has been pivotal to the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrasocietal conflicts. Exploiting an exogenous source of variations in population diversity across nations and ethnic groups, as determined predominantly during the exodus of humans from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, the study demonstrates that population diversity, and its impact on the degree of diversity within ethnic groups, has contributed significantly to the risk and intensity of historical and contemporary civil conflicts. The findings arguably reflect the contribution of population diversity to the non‐cohesiveness of society, as reflected partly in the prevalence of mistrust, the divergence in preferences for public goods and redistributive policies, and the degree of fractionalization and polarization across ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups.

We study a signal‐jamming model of product review manipulation in which rational consumers consult product reviews and price to better estimate a product's quality, and a firm, whose quality is either high or low, chooses its price and how much bias to insert into product reviews. We show that both firm types always exert positive effort to manipulate product reviews, and, depending on the equilibrium price level, one or both of them can increase its sales. When the high‐type firm exerts more effort than the low‐type, review manipulation benefits consumers by raising [lowering] their demand for the high‐quality [low‐quality] product.

This paper provides evidence for retrospective voting in the very long-term by exploiting a unique quasi-natural experiment of history. We trace the origins of party identification to a critical juncture in the local history of Sasun, a mountainous region of the Ottoman Empire located in Eastern Turkey. Sasun received vital support from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) both during the Great Massacres against Armenians at the end of the 19th century and during the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917). With the help of the ARF, some of the survivors from Sasun were resettled in various villages in modern-day Armenia. Although the party was not active in Armenia during seven decades of Soviet rule, we find that villages with Sasun ancestry display substantially higher electoral support for the ARF than other villages. Evidence from first names of current residents and our field work suggest that this differential support can, at least in part, be explained by historical gratitude and sympathy for the party. We offer suggestive evidence to explain why this sympathy might have endured over generations.

Why do coups d’état happen? Although many studies have investigated this question, they pay relatively little attention to the international causes and ramifications of coups. Especially, empirical studies on the external determinants of coup risk and outcomes still remain limited. There are two current lines of research in this direction. The first line studies international linkages and coup risk, looking at the external determinants of coups: regional spillover effects, foreign linkage, and foreign leverage. A promising angle on this front is focusing on the role of post-coup reactions from international actors to illuminate how coup plotters shape their incentives under outside pressure. The second line of research investigates interstate conflict and coup risk, considering diversionary behavior and external threats as potential coup-proofing strategies. In this effort, studying the relationship between external threat environment and coup risk can be fruitful, whereas empirical tests of the classical diversionary war theory will yield relatively marginal contributions. Currently, three issues stand out in the empirical coup literature that should be further addressed by scholars. First is the need for more extensive and systematic data collection efforts to obtain detailed information about the identities, targets, and motives of coup perpetrators. Second, the external sources of leader insecurity beyond interstate conflicts remain an underexplored area. Third, although many studies have tried to determine when coup attempts happen, scholarly knowledge of when and how they succeed remains very limited. More work is needed to uncover the determinants of coup success across different regimes and leader survival scenarios.

We provide a game‐theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a Bayesian voter. The latter is uncertain about how good the candidates are. Candidates take unobservable, costly actions to manipulate voter's opinion about their positions. We show that if the candidates differ in campaigning efficiency, and the voter receives the biased campaign messages with some noise, then the cost‐efficient candidate can win the election with higher probability than her opponent even when she is ex‐post an inferior choice for the voter. Our paper offers a novel informational justification for imposing limits on campaign spending and encouraging diversity in the supply of political information.

This paper focuses on the Ottoman economy from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the early twentieth century when the first wave of economic globalization coupled with the sweeping forces of rapid industrialization in the West led to major structural changes that are deemed to be responsible for the Great Divergence in income levels. An important part of this process for the Ottoman economy and the rest of the Periphery was secular improvements and increased volatility in the relative price of exports compared to imports, i.e., the terms of trade (ToT). A large body of literature suggests that both the changes in and the volatility of ToT may affect economic development in different ways. We present empirical predictions for Ottoman income growth under various counterfactual ToT scenarios to offer a perspective on the absolute and relative importance of ToT volatility and ToT growth for the Ottoman economy. According to our findings, Ottoman GDP per capita could have grown about 0.63–0.80 percentage points faster on average per year over the period 1800–1870, if the Empire faced only half the decadal ToT volatility it actually experienced over the same period.

Diversionary war theory holds that insecure leaders are more likely to pursue aggressive foreign policies than their more secure counterparts. This hypothesis rests on the premise that interstate dispute involvement helps leaders deter potential challenges against their rule. We offer strong support for this premise by looking at coup attempts. Cross-national time-series evidence from interstate dispute participation over the period 1960–2000 indicates that a country in a militarized confrontation with another state is about 60% less likely to experience a coup attempt in the subsequent year. Consistent with our hypothesis, we establish that it is mainly militarized involvement in disputes, rather than non-militarized involvement, that is associated with lower coup likelihood. The results are robust to controlling for a wide set of potential correlates of coups and remain qualitatively intact when we focus entirely on within-country variations in coup attempts and interstate disputes.