There has been a revival of warfare and threats of interstate war in recent years as the number of countries engaged in armed conflict surged dramatically, reaching to levels unprecedented since the end of Cold War. This is happening at a time when the global burden of mental health illness is...

This paper examines the role of trade liberalization under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade (GATT) in promoting economic recovery and growth in Europe in the decade after World War II. The formation of the GATT does not appear to have stimulated a particularly rapid...

Grim national statistics about the U.S. opioid crisis are increasingly well known to the American public. Far less well known is that U.S. war veterans are at ground zero of the epidemic, facing an overdose rate twice that of civilians. Post-9/11 deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq have exposed...

Using General William Sherman's 1864-65 military march through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina during the American Civil War, this paper studies the effect of capital destruction on medium and long-run local economic activity, and the role of financial markets in the recovery...

We analyze long-term impacts of the 1967-1970 Nigerian Civil War, providing the first evidence of intergenerational impacts. Women exposed to the war in their growing years exhibit reduced adult stature, increased likelihood of being overweight, earlier age at first birth, and lower educational...

As of this writing, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are in their eighth and tenth years, having accrued nearly a trillion dollars in direct military costs. I review the history of cost forecasts for these ongoing engagements, highlighting the differences across them in scope and accuracy,...

A central question in intrastate conflicts is how insurgents are able to mobilize supporters to participate in violent and risky activities. A common explanation is that violence committed by counterinsurgent forces mobilizes certain segments of the population through a range of mechanisms. We...

Military spending, fatalities, and the destruction of capital, all of which are immediately felt and are often large, are the most overt costs of war. They are also relatively short-lived. The costs of war borne by combatants and their caretakers, which includes families, communities, and the...

This study estimates the effect of deployment location and length on the risk of developing PTSD, relative to what it would be from the normal military operations. We use a random sample of activity-duty enlisted personnel serving between 2001 and 2006. We identify PTSD cases from TRICARE...

Research on the effects of Vietnam military service suggests that Vietnam veterans experienced significantly higher mortality than both non-Vietnam veterans and the civilian population at large. These results, however, may be biased by non-random selection into the military if unobserved...