War and Relatedness

Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg

NBER Working Paper No. 15095
Issued in June 2009
NBER Program(s):Political Economy

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of interstate conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, showing that populations that are genetically closer are more prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for a wide set of measures of geographic distance and other factors that affect conflict, including measures of trade and democracy.

Acknowledgments

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w15095

Published: Enrico Spolaore & Romain Wacziarg, 2016. "War and Relatedness," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 98(5), pages 925-939, December. citation courtesy of