Strategic Mass Killings

We provide a model of conict and mass killing decisions, to identify the key variables and situations that make mass killings more likely to oc-cur. We predict that mass killings are most likely in countries with large amounts of natural resources, institutional constraints regarding rent shar-ing, and low productivity of labor in other sectors. The role of resources like oil, gas and diamonds and other key determinants of mass killings is con rmed by our empirical results based on country level as well as ethnic group level analysis