The Economics of Conflict

Based on critical discussion and replication of the existing literature on both determinants as well as consequences of conflict (ranging from civil war to social unrest) we will discuss questions like the connections between economic inequality, political repression, poverty or gender inequality and conflict. Each student will be working on a specific article allocated in the beginning. During the seminar, you will replicate and extend the article using the statistical program Stata. In the mandatory tutorial, Stata and the application of relevant methods for conflict studies will be introduced. In the block seminar, we will discuss everybody’s results so that we get to learn about different perspectives, methods and questions related to conflict.

Requirements: Knowledge in statistics and econometrics

Introductory Literature:

• Blattman, C. and E. Miguel (2010): Civil War. Journal of Economic Literature 48 (1): 3 – 57.
• Hegre, H. and N. Sambanis (2006): Sensitivity Analysis of Empirical Results on Civil War Onset. Journal of Conflict Resolution 50 (4): 508–535.
• Collier, P. (1999): On the Economic Consequences of Civil War. Oxford Economic Papers 51 (1):168–183.
• Collier, P. and A. Hoeffler (2004): Greed and Grievance in Civil War. Oxford Economic Papers56 (4): 563–595.

Dates:

• Application (extended) until October 13, 2019 (with the application form and a transcript of records)
• First meeting (mandatory): October 29^th, 2018, 16-18 pm (introduction into the topic, allocation of seminar papers), HS 1132)
  • Please note: The Stata tutorial starts before the first meeting takes place
• Withdrawal after October 29^th, 2019 is not possible
• Block seminar: January 09 and 10, 2019, 8-18 h
• Individual meetings to discuss extension ideas/seminar papers with Dr. Renner: November, 12, 2019 (13-17h) and December 17, 2019 (13-17h)
• Handing in presentations: 06^th January, 2019
• Handing in the final paper: 1^st of February, 2019

Stata tutorial (held by Lena Schmid, in the PC pool, Werthmannstr.):

1: Introduction to Stata (October 25, 8-12 h)

2: Estimation techniques I (October 31, 14-18 h)

3: Estimation techniques II (November 8, 08-12 h)

4: Estimation techniques III (November 22, 08-12 h)

5: Supervised estimation (December 6, 08-12 h)

5: Supervised estimation (December 13, 08-12 h)

6 ECTS: Seminar participants have to write a seminar paper (4,500-5,000 words plus tables, graphs and references), and to do a short presentation (20 minutes). In the paper, we expect a theoretical reasoning giving the foundation for the empirical part. The empirical part consists of a replication plus an extension of the allocated article plus a critical discussion touching on relevant literature related. For 6 ECTS, the theoretical reasoning as well as the literature part have to be extended.