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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Colonial Legacies And Institutional Legitimacy: Explaining Variation In State-Level Informal Economy Size, Makayla Barker
Colonial Legacies And Institutional Legitimacy: Explaining Variation In State-Level Informal Economy Size, Makayla Barker
Political Science Honors Projects
Abstract: Why are some states’ economies more formal than others? This question has critical significance for policy-makers who endeavor to tap into the reservoir of tax revenue and entrepreneurship that informal economies contain. More importantly, large informal economies inhibit public good provision and perpetuate the impoverishment, marginaliza- tion, and political instability of select communities. Despite major variation in the size of informal economies across states, most scholarship on the informal economy concentrates only on the causes and consequences of the phenomenon, while neglecting to address its variation. This thesis builds on a canon of scholarship surrounding colonial legacies, new- institutional …
Do Weapons Make Warfare? An Instrumental Variables Approach Towards Investigating The Relationship Between Small Arms Abundance, Civil Conflict Onset, And Civil Conflict Intensity, Gabriel S. Barrett
Do Weapons Make Warfare? An Instrumental Variables Approach Towards Investigating The Relationship Between Small Arms Abundance, Civil Conflict Onset, And Civil Conflict Intensity, Gabriel S. Barrett
Political Science Honors Projects
Scholars, journalists, and policymakers frequently attribute the intensity and onset of civil conflict to the abundance of small arms. However, the direction of causality has been difficult to assess due to a lack of data on the illicit small arms market and the plausibly endogenous relationship between the abundance of weapons and civil conflict. Using a new dataset of estimated small arms prices, I determine that a decrease in the price of small arms is significantly and negatively correlated with an increase in the intensity of conflict in the following year. I also determine that small arms prices increase in …