Despite the vast number of studies of the guns-butter trade-off, we still do not know whether guns come at the expense of butter. In this article we attempt to clarify some of the major conceptual, measurement and statistical problems associated with this line of research

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...

One of the premises of democratization is that political parties are able to contest in elections. As local governments are able to control a large amount of resources, the results of local elections can be crucial to a party's prospects in national elections. In Taiwan, local elections used to...

It is generally agreed that when a relatively low-profile election is held simultaneously with a high-profile election, voter turnout rate of the former tends to be higher than it would be if it were held separately. The central concern of this study is twofold. The first one is to estimate the...

Prospect theory is a descriptive model of individual decision-making under risk (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). The central tenet of prospect theory posits that the risk orientation of decision-makers is affected by the gains vs. losses domains in which they are situated. Individuals are predicted...

In this paper, we summarize a series of experimental studies that show that democracies don't fight each other because their leaders have very few political incentives to do so. The use of force against other democracies is perceived by the public and by leaders of democratic states as a failure...

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;...