Kristopher W. Ramsay

Revisiting the Resource Curse: Natural Disasters, the Price of Oil, and Democracy

Fluctuations in the price of oil and the contemporaneous political changes in oil-producing countries have raised an important question about the link between oil rents, political institutions, and civil liberties. This article presents a simple model of the relationship between resource income and political freedom and, using an instrumental variables approach, estimates the causal effect of shocks to oil revenues on levels of democracy. Using a new data set, multiple measures of democracy, and various specifications, I find that the effect of oil price shocks is larger than might be expected and on the order of the effects found from changes in gross domestic product.

Politics at the Water’s Edge Crisis Bargaining and Electoral Competition

The role of domestic politics is investigated, using a model to show how domestic opposition during a crisis can reveal to a rival state private information about the incumbent. In particular, the public nature of democratic competition results in the institutionally induced credibility of the message.

Design, Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

In “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” Robert Pape (2003) presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Papes conclusions because he “samples on the dependent variable.”—The data only contain cases in which suicide terror is used. We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Papes hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Papes research design.

Settling It on the Field Battlefield Events and War Termination

Using a sample of battlefield data from twentieth-century wars, the author of this article tests a number of previously untested hypotheses linking battle events and the decision to end violent conflict. The author explores how factors like the distribution of power, battlefield casualties, and information that flows from the battlefield influence war termination. The analysis speaks to the validity of competing rational choice theories of war termination.

Inducing Deterrence through Moral Hazard in Alliance Contracts

Do military alliances foster aggressive behavior in allies to the point of undermining the security goal of the alliance? Like others, we find that alliance commitments may cause moral hazard because allies do not fully internalize the costs of actions that can lead to war. But unlike others, we show that the effect of moral hazard can improve security. Moral hazard can be the driving force behind generating deterrence and avoiding costly conflict. Aggressors may refrain from initiating crises if their target enjoys additional resources from its ally and so is more willing to fight back. So rather than incurring costs, moral hazard may be the very key to deterring potential aggressors and minimizing the risk of conflict. This behavior allows alliance partners to capture a “deterrence surplus,” which are the gains from avoiding conflict.

Evolution of cooperation and skew under imperfect information

The evolution of cooperation in nature and human societies depends crucially on how the benefits from cooperation are divided and whether individuals have complete information about their payoffs. We tackle these questions by adopting a methodology from economics called mechanism design. Focusing on reproductive skew as a case study, we show that full cooperation may not be achievable due to private information over individuals’ outside options, regardless of the details of the specific biological or social interaction. Further, we consider how the structure of the interaction can evolve to promote the maximum amount of cooperation in the face of the informational constraints. Our results point to a distinct avenue for investigating how cooperation can evolve when the division of benefits is flexible and individuals have private information.

Outside Options and Burden Sharing in Nonbinding Alliances

The authors develop a model of alliances with outside options to study burden sharing in nonbinding alliance agreements. The analysis provides an explanation for the variation in ally contributions to NATO over time and why the post—Cold War period has seen an increase in the use of coalitions of the willing. Additionally, the analysis reveals something of an initiator’s disadvantage in burden sharing—the initiator of an alliance action pays a disproportionate cost of the military burden. The authors’ argument provides an alternative explanation for why the United States has been consistently the largest contributor to NATO.

The Calculus of the Security Dilemma

Some scholars known as offensive realists claim that in the uncertainty of world politics, trust and cooperation between states is extremely unlikely. Others, such as defensive realists , claim that rational states are capable of finding ways to counteract the complications created by misperceptions and distrust, and to reduce uncertainty to levels where it no longer inhibits cooperation. In this paper, we construct a formal model to show how in some situations cooperation between states is indeed very unlikely: even in the presence of minor misperceptions, states fail to cooperate. We then ask whether diplomacy (modeled as cheap talk) is able to remedy the failure. We show that in many situations, allowing the countries to communicate prior to taking their actions does not enable them to cooperate.

Dispute Resolution Institutions and Strategic Militarization

A central question in political science is how to best manage information asymmetries and commitment problems when disputes arise between states or nations. We argue that common framings of this problem miss an important feature: the institutions determining how disputes are resolved shape the incentives for nations to enter disputes. Because war can be sometimes understood as the down-side risk from entering a dispute, institutions that reduce the chances of war-fighting may induce perverse incentives to enter into disputes and militarize. We develop a simple crisis model that captures both the militarization decisions and bargaining behavior. We examine how features like direct communication and third-party involvement alter the incentives. Seemingly effective institutions that improve the chance of peace for a given distribution of military strength, can actually lower the chance of peace once one accounts for distortions to militarization decisions. To illustrate the value of this broader perspective we show how a form of intervention by a mediator concerned only with resolving the current crisis, turns out to create optimal militarization and bargaining incentives.

Investment and Bargaining

We consider bargaining between two players who may invest ex ante in their agreement and disagreement payoffs. We characterize necessary conditions on equilibrium investment strategies in this environment, describe how investments and the probability of outcomes must vary across mechanisms, and specify what equilibrium conditions imply for constraints on various aspects of the design environment. In the case of private values any two trading rules that induce the same equilibrium lotteries over valuations induce the same probability of trade. We also show that equilibrium descriptions are fragile in the sense that descriptions that cannot be supported by any equilibrium investment decisions are dense in the space of problems. We exhibit an approach to recovering cost functions that support the primitives of a Bayesian Mechanism design problem. By way of an example, we use an unraveling argument to show that uniform distributions over valuations cannot emerge from equilibria investments to the Chatterjee-Samuelson bilateral trade mechanism for any strictly increasing cost functions.