The study of the effects of armed conflicts on prosocial behavior has so far been constrained by ... more The study of the effects of armed conflicts on prosocial behavior has so far been constrained by possible selection biases which limits the establishment of causality and by the simultaneous activation of mechanisms at both the individual and societal levels which then makes it difficult, if not impossible, to attribute the observed changes in behavior to changes in preferences. In this paper we use a novel experimental setting that allows us to overcome these constraints and identify causal effects that transmit through changes in individual preferences, if any. We conduct an incentive-compatible lab-in-the-field experiment with a large representative sample in a natural experiment setting to study how exposure to armed conflict affects altruistic behavior of individuals. Our results indicate that exposure to armed conflict does not lead to an overall change in altruistic preferences, but that those individuals who directly experience traumatic events of armed violence display out-...
We conduct an incentive-compatible lab-in-the-field experiment with a large representative sample... more We conduct an incentive-compatible lab-in-the-field experiment with a large representative sample to study how exposure to armed conflict affects risk and ambiguity attitudes of individuals. We identify random exposure to conflict by relying on a natural experiment in Turkey created by the military institutions and the long running civil conflict. We find that as the degree of exposure to the armed conflict environment increases individuals become more tolerant to risk. Having traumatic direct experiences of armed violence, however, creates the opposite effect and renders them extremely risk averse. Such individuals are also more likely to be ambiguity averse.
This article analyzes the association between civil conflicts and educational achievement by stud... more This article analyzes the association between civil conflicts and educational achievement by studying the Turkish case. It combines the 2005 university entrance exam scores of more than 1.6 million students and a newly constructed data set on the casualties of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict to study the association between the conflict and educational achievement of Turkish students. The results reveal a significant negative association. Combined with the already well-established positive links between education and various measures of socioeconomic development like economic growth, social equality, and public health, the results in this article demon-strate that education is one of the channels through which civil conflicts damage the well-being of societies thereby creating the conditions that perpetuate them. Keywords civil conflict, education Civil conflicts perpetuate themselves by changing in certain ways the societies expe-rience them. These conflicts pull societies into a ‘‘co...
Existing works on diffusion fail to account for the incapacitating effects conflict events may ha... more Existing works on diffusion fail to account for the incapacitating effects conflict events may have on the operational capability of the combatant sides and how these effects may determine the evolution of a conflict. I hypothesize that it is those events with losses on the state side that are likely to be associated with geo-temporal spillovers, whereas events with insurgency losses are less likely to be associated with future mayhem in their vicinity. To test my arguments, I first introduce a new, comprehensive and detailed event dataset on the long-running civil conflict in Turkey. The Turkish State–PKK Conflict Event Database (TPCONED) includes the exact date and county-level location for the fatal events of the armed conflict between the Turkish state and the rebel organization PKK since its very beginning in 1984 with detailed information on combatant casualties. I then employ a split population bi-probit model which allows me to comprehensively depict the geotemporal evolutio...
Using an incentivized laboratory experiment, we investigate whether and how partnership agreement... more Using an incentivized laboratory experiment, we investigate whether and how partnership agreements affect partners' contributions levels. We find that the two most common real-life practices, the lockstep agreement (where all surplus is shared equally) and the performance-based agreement (where all surplus is shared proportionally) do not significantly differ in terms of the individual contributions that they attract. We argue that this is because they do not distinguish between positive and negative surplus, and show that individual contributions are significantly higher when positive surplus is shared proportionally and negative surplus is shared equally. Lastly, we find that these results still hold when equal shares in an agreement are replaced with (fixed) unequal shares.
The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wi... more The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP url' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 2019
We are delighted to announce the 2nd Walter Isard Annual Award for the best article in Peace Econ... more We are delighted to announce the 2nd Walter Isard Annual Award for the best article in Peace Economics Peace Science and Public Policy (PEPS). As it is widely known, the award is named after Walter Isard, founder of PEPS and an acknowledged founding father of Peace Science. Walter founded PEPS in 1993 with the aim to create a novel outlet for peace scientists. In particular, PEPS was intended to attract contributions from a growing interdisciplinary community of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines such as economics and political science, as well as regional science, geography and mathematics. Accordingly, PEPS is open to all contributions with the potential to deepen our understanding of peace and its components. And, following the Peace Science tradition, PEPS welcomes both positive and normative studies alongside policy-oriented papers. The editors of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy have decided to award this year’s award to the article “Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Microfinance and Democratic Engagement” authored by Samuel Wai Johnson Jr of George Mason University. The paper was published in the 3rd issue of the 2018 volume. In this paper, Johnson Jr. empirically studies the comparative effects of microfinance group lending, and individual lending technologies on measures of women’s political capital in the fragile conflict-affected setting of Liberia. He theoretically builds and tests the hypothesis that group lending microfinance has a greater effect on client’s political capital than individual lending microfinance. The theory rests on the premise that group lending microfinance programs, which come with requirements to form groups and hold regular meetings, nudge clients towards social intermediation and communal activism whereas individual lending microfinance programs lack the mechanism to influence members to organize communal loan groups or develop skills for cooperative entrepreneurship or collective action. The empirical tests of this hypothesis are based on data collected from a skilfully designed survey that was administered to Liberian female clients of group and individual microfinance lending programs as well as a control group of microentrepreneurs who were qualified for loan membership in either microfinance program but had not been admitted. Johnson Jr. measures the political capital of these women by whether they had registered to vote and whether they had ever contacted their legislators. The results of the statistical analyses indicate that these measures are positively correlated with the time a woman remains in the group lending microfinance program. The editors commend the study for its attention to building a strong theoretical base; for its clarity of definitions and concepts; for directing attention to and improving our understanding of a simple and practical tool, i.e. microfinance lending, which can be of great use in rebuilding social and political capital in post-conflict societies; for its data collection efforts and for its contribution of this new data set that future studies can benefit from; and finally for the clear presentation of all its arguments and results.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2019
Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a pu... more Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.
Analyzing novel data sets from Turkey, we provide empirical evidence for our theoretical argument... more Analyzing novel data sets from Turkey, we provide empirical evidence for our theoretical argument that a major mechanism through which civil conflicts exert their long term negative influences on public health is by discouraging medical personnel to practice in conflict regions. We show that the long running civil conflict in Turkey has been driving away doctors and other highly trained medical personnel from conflict areas, and that availability of medical personnel is positively associated with public health. We then assess the effectiveness of certain policy measures that have been tried out by Turkish governments over the years to counteract the negative impact of the This research was funded in part by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under 1 grant 114K013.
By analyzing two novel data sets from Turkey, we provide empirical evidence for yet another negat... more By analyzing two novel data sets from Turkey, we provide empirical evidence for yet another negative consequence of civil conflicts. We show that the long running civil conflict in Turkey has been driving away doctors and other highly trained medical personnel from conflict areas, and that availability of medical personnel is positively associated with public health. By doing so, we illuminate an important, yet never analyzed before mechanism through which civil conflicts exert their long-term negative influences on public health in host societies. We then proceed to provide some evidence that a similar dynamic is in play in education as well.
This dissertation studies political decision making through a veto players approach which entails... more This dissertation studies political decision making through a veto players approach which entails identifying those political actors with the power to veto the decision, and understanding the political outcome as a product of the interaction of these actors. The veto players literature so far takes veto players as simple, domestic actors with given preferences that are common knowledge to everyone. This approach leaves out any strategic interaction that may take place among veto players as it treats them as commonly known preference profiles, and thus creates serious gaps in the literature. This dissertation aims to fill these gaps in the literature by treating veto players, and those third parties that the veto players are accountable to as strategic actors in the game of politics which may take place in limited-information settings. The second important factor that the literature has not explored yet is the emergence of new veto players. This dissertation acknowledges that in certain policy areas the set of relevant veto players may include foreign actors as well as domestic ones, and analyzes how the emergence and the existence of these new players influence political decision making and the resulting policies. Finally, the fact that veto players in a political system are either elected or appointed, and thus are usually accountable to those who effect or appoint them, is the third factor that the veto players literature has yet to take into account. This dissertation includes those third parties as strategic players in the game of political decision making, and thus contributes towards filling out this gap in the literature. The chapters investigate general questions on institutions and political decision making while drawing upon specific examples from Turkish politics using formal analysis, and game theoretical and statistical tools.
Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a pu... more Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.
Ever since the 1992, Maastricht Treaty, the European Union has aimed at deepening its integration... more Ever since the 1992, Maastricht Treaty, the European Union has aimed at deepening its integration on foreign, security and defense policies. The integration process in these specific areas evolved rather slowly because competences were seen mainly as member states’ responsibilities. This meant that integration in foreign, security and defense matters proceeded on a rather bumpy road as member states’ preferences diverged from one another on security matters. This is hardly surprising given the fact that common decision making on foreign policy issues is problematic especially if a member state perceives key national interests at stake. Since foreign policy is still intergovernmental, any member state could act as a veto player. The key issue, of course, is whether a collective European interest in foreign policy exists which transcends the national interests of the EU members. This paper approaches these issues by focusing on an important area for the EU’s foreign policy, the Transatlantic relationship. A key proposition in this paper is that the pace and nature of the European integration process impacts the Transatlantic relationship. If the EU were an internally unified, coherent bloc on foreign policy matters, the Transatlantic relationship would have radically changed in consequence. In the absence of strong supranational direction and control of the security issues, the EU presents itself as a disjointed body vis-a-vis the USA. This in turn makes the member states emerge as the critical interlocutors on the Transatlantic relationship rather than the EU institutions. A key challenge for the future of Transatlantic relationship is than the process of European integration itself.
according to a truncated bivariate normal distribution; b) that their expected values are indepen... more according to a truncated bivariate normal distribution; b) that their expected values are independent of the ethnic composition; c) that HADEP (MHP) votes across counties are independent after conditioning on ethnic composition. Admittedly ,the second assumption is the most likely one to fail in the Turkish context. King suggests plotting estimated county level ethnic Kurdish (Turkish) votes for HADEP (MHP) against the percentage of ethnic Kurds (Turks) across counties as a diagnostic for the presence of an aggregation bias. The plots indicate some small bias but not enough to warrant discarding the analysis. 75 Note that the estimated coefficient for the effect of casualties on ethnic Kurdish votes for MHP is positive (albeit very small) and significant. One explanation for this might be the village guards system. Because there are ethnic Kurds who make money out of this system, MHP's strong support for the continuation of the system might have appealed to them. 76 Neighboring counties to a county are those that border that county. 77 We have also conducted jackknife cross validation which re-estimates the model parameters by resampling serially leaving one county out each time. The mean and the variance of the distribution of the parameter estimates from these iterations are very close to the original results. The results are available upon request. 78 Note that because we can only analyze the casualties of the 1995-1999 period, we have only one observation at the county level, and consequently the possible correlation of error terms within counties is not a problem anymore. But we still have the clustering of counties within provinces. we use OLS with clustered errors to account for the possibility of intraprovince correlation of errors. Note also that the existence of the lagged dependent variable in the model renders a random or fixed effects model unsuitable. 79 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
The study of the effects of armed conflicts on prosocial behavior has so far been constrained by ... more The study of the effects of armed conflicts on prosocial behavior has so far been constrained by possible selection biases which limits the establishment of causality and by the simultaneous activation of mechanisms at both the individual and societal levels which then makes it difficult, if not impossible, to attribute the observed changes in behavior to changes in preferences. In this paper we use a novel experimental setting that allows us to overcome these constraints and identify causal effects that transmit through changes in individual preferences, if any. We conduct an incentive-compatible lab-in-the-field experiment with a large representative sample in a natural experiment setting to study how exposure to armed conflict affects altruistic behavior of individuals. Our results indicate that exposure to armed conflict does not lead to an overall change in altruistic preferences, but that those individuals who directly experience traumatic events of armed violence display out-...
We conduct an incentive-compatible lab-in-the-field experiment with a large representative sample... more We conduct an incentive-compatible lab-in-the-field experiment with a large representative sample to study how exposure to armed conflict affects risk and ambiguity attitudes of individuals. We identify random exposure to conflict by relying on a natural experiment in Turkey created by the military institutions and the long running civil conflict. We find that as the degree of exposure to the armed conflict environment increases individuals become more tolerant to risk. Having traumatic direct experiences of armed violence, however, creates the opposite effect and renders them extremely risk averse. Such individuals are also more likely to be ambiguity averse.
This article analyzes the association between civil conflicts and educational achievement by stud... more This article analyzes the association between civil conflicts and educational achievement by studying the Turkish case. It combines the 2005 university entrance exam scores of more than 1.6 million students and a newly constructed data set on the casualties of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict to study the association between the conflict and educational achievement of Turkish students. The results reveal a significant negative association. Combined with the already well-established positive links between education and various measures of socioeconomic development like economic growth, social equality, and public health, the results in this article demon-strate that education is one of the channels through which civil conflicts damage the well-being of societies thereby creating the conditions that perpetuate them. Keywords civil conflict, education Civil conflicts perpetuate themselves by changing in certain ways the societies expe-rience them. These conflicts pull societies into a ‘‘co...
Existing works on diffusion fail to account for the incapacitating effects conflict events may ha... more Existing works on diffusion fail to account for the incapacitating effects conflict events may have on the operational capability of the combatant sides and how these effects may determine the evolution of a conflict. I hypothesize that it is those events with losses on the state side that are likely to be associated with geo-temporal spillovers, whereas events with insurgency losses are less likely to be associated with future mayhem in their vicinity. To test my arguments, I first introduce a new, comprehensive and detailed event dataset on the long-running civil conflict in Turkey. The Turkish State–PKK Conflict Event Database (TPCONED) includes the exact date and county-level location for the fatal events of the armed conflict between the Turkish state and the rebel organization PKK since its very beginning in 1984 with detailed information on combatant casualties. I then employ a split population bi-probit model which allows me to comprehensively depict the geotemporal evolutio...
Using an incentivized laboratory experiment, we investigate whether and how partnership agreement... more Using an incentivized laboratory experiment, we investigate whether and how partnership agreements affect partners' contributions levels. We find that the two most common real-life practices, the lockstep agreement (where all surplus is shared equally) and the performance-based agreement (where all surplus is shared proportionally) do not significantly differ in terms of the individual contributions that they attract. We argue that this is because they do not distinguish between positive and negative surplus, and show that individual contributions are significantly higher when positive surplus is shared proportionally and negative surplus is shared equally. Lastly, we find that these results still hold when equal shares in an agreement are replaced with (fixed) unequal shares.
The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wi... more The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP url' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 2019
We are delighted to announce the 2nd Walter Isard Annual Award for the best article in Peace Econ... more We are delighted to announce the 2nd Walter Isard Annual Award for the best article in Peace Economics Peace Science and Public Policy (PEPS). As it is widely known, the award is named after Walter Isard, founder of PEPS and an acknowledged founding father of Peace Science. Walter founded PEPS in 1993 with the aim to create a novel outlet for peace scientists. In particular, PEPS was intended to attract contributions from a growing interdisciplinary community of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines such as economics and political science, as well as regional science, geography and mathematics. Accordingly, PEPS is open to all contributions with the potential to deepen our understanding of peace and its components. And, following the Peace Science tradition, PEPS welcomes both positive and normative studies alongside policy-oriented papers. The editors of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy have decided to award this year’s award to the article “Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Microfinance and Democratic Engagement” authored by Samuel Wai Johnson Jr of George Mason University. The paper was published in the 3rd issue of the 2018 volume. In this paper, Johnson Jr. empirically studies the comparative effects of microfinance group lending, and individual lending technologies on measures of women’s political capital in the fragile conflict-affected setting of Liberia. He theoretically builds and tests the hypothesis that group lending microfinance has a greater effect on client’s political capital than individual lending microfinance. The theory rests on the premise that group lending microfinance programs, which come with requirements to form groups and hold regular meetings, nudge clients towards social intermediation and communal activism whereas individual lending microfinance programs lack the mechanism to influence members to organize communal loan groups or develop skills for cooperative entrepreneurship or collective action. The empirical tests of this hypothesis are based on data collected from a skilfully designed survey that was administered to Liberian female clients of group and individual microfinance lending programs as well as a control group of microentrepreneurs who were qualified for loan membership in either microfinance program but had not been admitted. Johnson Jr. measures the political capital of these women by whether they had registered to vote and whether they had ever contacted their legislators. The results of the statistical analyses indicate that these measures are positively correlated with the time a woman remains in the group lending microfinance program. The editors commend the study for its attention to building a strong theoretical base; for its clarity of definitions and concepts; for directing attention to and improving our understanding of a simple and practical tool, i.e. microfinance lending, which can be of great use in rebuilding social and political capital in post-conflict societies; for its data collection efforts and for its contribution of this new data set that future studies can benefit from; and finally for the clear presentation of all its arguments and results.
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2019
Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a pu... more Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.
Analyzing novel data sets from Turkey, we provide empirical evidence for our theoretical argument... more Analyzing novel data sets from Turkey, we provide empirical evidence for our theoretical argument that a major mechanism through which civil conflicts exert their long term negative influences on public health is by discouraging medical personnel to practice in conflict regions. We show that the long running civil conflict in Turkey has been driving away doctors and other highly trained medical personnel from conflict areas, and that availability of medical personnel is positively associated with public health. We then assess the effectiveness of certain policy measures that have been tried out by Turkish governments over the years to counteract the negative impact of the This research was funded in part by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under 1 grant 114K013.
By analyzing two novel data sets from Turkey, we provide empirical evidence for yet another negat... more By analyzing two novel data sets from Turkey, we provide empirical evidence for yet another negative consequence of civil conflicts. We show that the long running civil conflict in Turkey has been driving away doctors and other highly trained medical personnel from conflict areas, and that availability of medical personnel is positively associated with public health. By doing so, we illuminate an important, yet never analyzed before mechanism through which civil conflicts exert their long-term negative influences on public health in host societies. We then proceed to provide some evidence that a similar dynamic is in play in education as well.
This dissertation studies political decision making through a veto players approach which entails... more This dissertation studies political decision making through a veto players approach which entails identifying those political actors with the power to veto the decision, and understanding the political outcome as a product of the interaction of these actors. The veto players literature so far takes veto players as simple, domestic actors with given preferences that are common knowledge to everyone. This approach leaves out any strategic interaction that may take place among veto players as it treats them as commonly known preference profiles, and thus creates serious gaps in the literature. This dissertation aims to fill these gaps in the literature by treating veto players, and those third parties that the veto players are accountable to as strategic actors in the game of politics which may take place in limited-information settings. The second important factor that the literature has not explored yet is the emergence of new veto players. This dissertation acknowledges that in certain policy areas the set of relevant veto players may include foreign actors as well as domestic ones, and analyzes how the emergence and the existence of these new players influence political decision making and the resulting policies. Finally, the fact that veto players in a political system are either elected or appointed, and thus are usually accountable to those who effect or appoint them, is the third factor that the veto players literature has yet to take into account. This dissertation includes those third parties as strategic players in the game of political decision making, and thus contributes towards filling out this gap in the literature. The chapters investigate general questions on institutions and political decision making while drawing upon specific examples from Turkish politics using formal analysis, and game theoretical and statistical tools.
Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a pu... more Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.
Ever since the 1992, Maastricht Treaty, the European Union has aimed at deepening its integration... more Ever since the 1992, Maastricht Treaty, the European Union has aimed at deepening its integration on foreign, security and defense policies. The integration process in these specific areas evolved rather slowly because competences were seen mainly as member states’ responsibilities. This meant that integration in foreign, security and defense matters proceeded on a rather bumpy road as member states’ preferences diverged from one another on security matters. This is hardly surprising given the fact that common decision making on foreign policy issues is problematic especially if a member state perceives key national interests at stake. Since foreign policy is still intergovernmental, any member state could act as a veto player. The key issue, of course, is whether a collective European interest in foreign policy exists which transcends the national interests of the EU members. This paper approaches these issues by focusing on an important area for the EU’s foreign policy, the Transatlantic relationship. A key proposition in this paper is that the pace and nature of the European integration process impacts the Transatlantic relationship. If the EU were an internally unified, coherent bloc on foreign policy matters, the Transatlantic relationship would have radically changed in consequence. In the absence of strong supranational direction and control of the security issues, the EU presents itself as a disjointed body vis-a-vis the USA. This in turn makes the member states emerge as the critical interlocutors on the Transatlantic relationship rather than the EU institutions. A key challenge for the future of Transatlantic relationship is than the process of European integration itself.
according to a truncated bivariate normal distribution; b) that their expected values are indepen... more according to a truncated bivariate normal distribution; b) that their expected values are independent of the ethnic composition; c) that HADEP (MHP) votes across counties are independent after conditioning on ethnic composition. Admittedly ,the second assumption is the most likely one to fail in the Turkish context. King suggests plotting estimated county level ethnic Kurdish (Turkish) votes for HADEP (MHP) against the percentage of ethnic Kurds (Turks) across counties as a diagnostic for the presence of an aggregation bias. The plots indicate some small bias but not enough to warrant discarding the analysis. 75 Note that the estimated coefficient for the effect of casualties on ethnic Kurdish votes for MHP is positive (albeit very small) and significant. One explanation for this might be the village guards system. Because there are ethnic Kurds who make money out of this system, MHP's strong support for the continuation of the system might have appealed to them. 76 Neighboring counties to a county are those that border that county. 77 We have also conducted jackknife cross validation which re-estimates the model parameters by resampling serially leaving one county out each time. The mean and the variance of the distribution of the parameter estimates from these iterations are very close to the original results. The results are available upon request. 78 Note that because we can only analyze the casualties of the 1995-1999 period, we have only one observation at the county level, and consequently the possible correlation of error terms within counties is not a problem anymore. But we still have the clustering of counties within provinces. we use OLS with clustered errors to account for the possibility of intraprovince correlation of errors. Note also that the existence of the lagged dependent variable in the model renders a random or fixed effects model unsuitable. 79 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
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