A notable feature of post-World War II civil wars is their very long average duration. We provide a theory of the persistence of civil wars. The civilian government can successfully defeat rebellious factions only by creating a relatively strong army. In weakly-institutionalized polities this...

Prior scholarly analysis of Israeli military spending has focused on national security questions. We present a mathematical model incorporating security threats as well as electoral cycles and corporate profits. The parameters are estimated empirically. The results support the idea that in...

Prior studies of the guns-versus-butter trade-off have focused on total military expenditures and sub-components of welfare spending (education, health, and housing). I extend the analysis to include the major sub-components of the defense budget. The results are consistent with Clayton's;...

Multicollinearity is one of the major methodological problems in the study of the guns‐growth trade-off. In this paper, we use ridge regression to separate the effects of individual variables influencing economic growth in the United States. Ridge is not a new method, but to the best of our...

Studies of the guns versus butter trade-off found no evidence for the existence of a trade-off in the pre-Reagan era (see Russett 1982; Domke, Eichenberg, and Kelleher 1983; Mintz 1989). This study extends prior research by examining not only the direct, immediate effects of defense spending but also...

In a series of articles published in the Fall 1990 issue of Defence Economics Alexander (1990), Atesoglu and Mueller (1990) and Huang and Mintz (1990) have all specified and empirically estimated defence‐growth models based on a neoclassical production function. We now isolate the externality...

In 1973 Emile Benoit published a seminal study which suggested that defence spending stimulated economic growth in Third World countries. His conclusion was based on a cross-national analysis of data for 44 developing countries over five years (1960–65). Specifically, Benoit found that after...

Despite the proliferation of studies on the impact of military spending on economic growth, it is still not known whether defense spending hinders or promotes growth. Most analysts attribute the lack of consistent/robust findings to three problems: the lack of a sound theory of defense-growth...