I'll first give you what motivates this question since that might better help you answer what I'm really interested in. A really general and silly explanation of in physics is that things will be happening when two systems in contact are at different energy levels. ^1 Simply put, I'm interested in macro phenomenon, involving conscious, rational, autonomous beings that reflect something similar to that general explanation of physics. So the first thing that came to mind is that wars would occur when two systems which exist at different economic standings ( measured by GDP or what ever standard fits the economic system) a war will break out. So obviously there are many things wrong with that simple minded statement and more explicit models like conflict over shared resources might better explain specific circumstances but what I've learned about different time periods, such as European imperialism or general empire dynamics -such as expansion, over extension and then collapse-- seem to hint at a relationship between the physical concept and historical evidence.
So what i'm really interested in is research investigating this relationship but more specifically sets of data contrasting occurrences of war with economic conditions.
[1] I didn't want to go into more detail because it didn't seem necessary and I thought this description would reach most people easily.
If I understand this correctly, you want something to explain how most wars might have the same causes due to the same socio-economics? If so, I would argue far from it.
Within the same set of wars, the causes of the War of the First Coalition (which is the outbreak of the French Revolution) is different than the War of the Sixth Coalition (A tired and broken Europe banding together to fight Napoleon). So within twenty years, two wars have different causes and different levels of socio-economic standards as all of Europe was wrecked by the Continental System (a trade system that existed to try to deprive the British of trade, wrecking the economics of most of Europe) and the near constant war that the powers were waging against Napoleon.
And if we look back a few years, the reason for the Napoleonic Wars have a different reason than the Seven Years War, which was to oust Frederick the Great and return Silesia to Austria/the Habsburgs.
Zoom out a hundred years and the Thirty Years Wars have a background that is completely different than the Napoleonic Wars, which had various 'nations' fighting for mostly religion reasons (except France, because France saw the possibility to expand at Holy Roman Imperial expense).
So, just within two hundred years, you have a series of wars that all bear no relation due to economics but rather socio-political means.
I would argue that there is a problem with the way you are looking at this, you are looking too much at data rather than people. People are unpredictable and act according to their wishes; Louis XIV said he was the State, thus propelling France into a unitary government where the King held absolute power but it was very different a thousand miles in the Holy Roman Empire where duchies and counties had near absolute autonomy from the Holy Roman Empire.
Economics doesn't cause war, people cause war. Europeans looked at underdeveloped Africa and said "Mine!" They pushed the Chinese and said "mine!" That doesn't mean that there was a level of economics that allowed them to say mine, they just did it because military technology allowed them to outpace China.
I ask that you be careful in how you look at history, because while we use scientific methods, history is not an absolute science. We deal with the actions of living, breathing people that did things for a variety of reasons. No two people are alike and no two nations are alike.
I hope this gives you a perspective of history that fulfills your question.
This is a Political Science question, and so you may wish to post this in /r/AskSocialScience instead.
Personally, I'd recommend checking out the Correlates of War project for data. For theories and other relevant literature to read, I'd check out this syllabus (pdf).
I'm interested in macro phenomenon, involving conscious, rational, autonomous beings that reflect something similar to that general explanation of physics
Assuming that people are rational actors that always choose to act in a way that betters their self-interest is highly problematic. I would bet that you could look around your own life and find many examples of people acting against their own self-interest, and that some of them would have done so via logic and some would have eschewed logic altogether.
As far as economics and war, I doubt there are many cases of a war being a "net profit" so to speak. There are clearly economic benefits in war--increased production, lowered unemployment, etc--but the costs are most often incredibly high. To quote Eisenhower:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
From a purely rational economic standpoint, the vagaries of war would seem to be a terrible investment. There may be some indicators in economics that might correlate to wars breaking out, but this would ignore all human agency. In my opinion, it would be a mistake to ignore the complexities of humans when examining the causes of war.