OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
This paper presents a generic approach for estimating and simulating a quantitative model of trade and violence. In this new theoretical and empirical framework, suited for disciplining sub-national and international data, we first model the general equilibrium interactions between the economic and fighting margins in a micro-founded setup. We then show how the structural parameters can be recovered from the data in a simple and transparent way: A central element of the procedure consists in estimating a gravity equation of violence. Looking at sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1997 to 2022, we test the key predictions of the model and uncover new facts related to spatial frictions and conflicts. Finally, the model is used to quantify counterfactual policy interventions that aim at promoting development in weakly institutionalized contexts where insecurity is pervasive.
