“Peace Diamonds: Combating Civil War With a Diamond Certification Scheme”: In this paper he examines the relationship between a country’s natural resource wealth and the probability of civil war. He examines this question by estimating the effect of the Kimberly Process, an international certification scheme that attempted to eliminates the sale of rough diamonds used to finance conflict. Link.

“From Institutions to Culture: Experiment Evidence”: In this research (joint with Robert Oxoby) they consider the effect of democracy on cooperation. In particular, they test the effect of democracy on the level of voluntary contributions in public goods games. They find that allowing people to vote on the public good significantly increases contributions. Moreover, the higher contributions persist over repetitions of the game while contributions fall to almost zero when participants are not able to vote on the public good. Link.

“Conflict, Redistribution and Repression”: In this paper Heffernan considers how the presence of resource wealth combines with insecure property rights to effect redistribution and the incentives to engage in repression. He examines this question from a theoretical perspective, modeling a government’s decision to invest the country’s resource wealth in increasing the productivity of the citizenry. Link.