Decomposing the Relationship Between Contiguity and Militarized Conflict

It is well known that the majority of militarized conflicts and wars have been fought by neighbors. Yet, much remains to be learned about the relationship between shared borders and militarized conflict. This article decomposes the effects of territorial contiguity into  ex ante  "observable" and "behavioral" effects. It provides powerful empirical evidence for the claim that although neighbors are more likely to experience conflict because of  ex ante  differences in observable variables such as economic interdependence, alliance membership, joint democracy, and the balance of military capabilities, most conflicts between neighbors occur because of differences in how neighbors and nonneighbors respond to the observable variables.     

Colonial Legacy and Foreign Aid: Decomposing the Colonial Bias

It is well-known that donors give considerably more foreign aid to former colonies than to countries lacking past colonial ties. Unfortunately, we know relatively little about why this is the case. For one, there is almost never a theoretical justification for the inclusion of colonial history in statistical models. For the other, the only explicitly made rationale by Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2009) actually predicts an interpretational problem: colonial history not only increases a former colony’s saliency to the donor, but also has left deep marks on recipients’ social and political institutions today. Both aspects shape how much aid a donor transfers to the recipient. This leaves ambiguous the meaning of the routinely found positive, sizable, and significant coefficient of colonial history on aid flows. We solve the inferential quandary by using a decomposition approach from labor econometrics. Our results show that about 75–100% of the colony effect on foreign aid stems from the greater saliency that donors give to policy concessions from former colonies.     

Mortal threat: Latvian Jews at the dawn of Nazi occupation

In late June 1941, Nazi Germany stormed the borders of the Soviet Union, occupying the three Baltic republics within weeks. By the end of 1941, a significant proportion of the Jewish population had been murdered by German forces and local collaborators. In the days before full Nazi occupation of the territory, Latvia’s Jews confronted the question of whether to flee into the Russian interior or stay in their communities. History shows that this would be a critical choice. Testimonies and memoirs of Jewish survivors illuminate the competing motivations to leave or to remain. This article highlights the key factors that figured into these calculations and the interaction between individual agency and structural opportunities and obstacles in determining where Latvia’s Jews were when Holocaust in their homeland began.