Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? To answer this question, we collect data on 173 countries between 1968 and 2014. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the global patterns of U.S. military aid, our paper is the first to provide causal estimates of the effect of U.S. military...

Does U.S. military aid make the United States safer? To answer this question, we collect data on 173 countries between 1968 and 2014. We exploit plausibly exogenous time variation in global levels of U.S. military aid associated with distinct aid programs and cross-national time-series variation...