Eli Berman

Eli Berman is Professor of Economics at UC San Diego, Research Director for International Security Studies at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and co-leads Economics of National Security meetings at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests include economic development and conflict, the economics of religion, labor economics, technological change, and economic demography.

His latest publications are The Empiricists’ Insurgency (with Aila Matanock) in the Annual Review of Political Science, Modest, Secure and Employed: Successful Development in Conflict Zones, (with Joseph Felter, Jacob Shapiro and Erin Troland, in The American Economic Review P&P 2013), Can Hearts and Minds be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq” (with Shapiro and Felter, in the Journal of Political Economy (2011), Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines (with Felter, Shapiro and Michael Callen), and Constructive COIN: How Development Can Fight Radicals (with Felter and Shapiro) in Foreign Affairs (2010). Recent grants supporting his research have come from the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the National Science Foundation. His book Radical, Religious and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism was published in 2009 by the MIT Press. Berman received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.