Despite the trend toward fewer armed conflicts and war deaths, dramatic variations in conflict casualties exist across countries. This article examines what factors affect casualties in civil as well as interstate wars and finds that conflict casualties are directly influenced by geography and...

The principal-agent problem and uncertainty are some of the key factors affecting financial and political markets. Fear of the unknown plays an important role in human decision making, including voting. This article describes a theoretical model where voter risk aversion towards uncertainty...

Using recently released data on public mental health expenditures by U.S. states from 1997 to 2005, this study is the first to examine the effect of state mental health spending on suicide rates. We find the effect of per capita public mental health expenditures on the suicide rate to be...

Many important determinants of traffic fatalities have been identified using the widely popular fixed-effects (FE) estimator for panel data. However, the FE estimator precludes an analysis of time-invariant or rarely changing variables, thereby obscuring their relative impact on traffic...

Previous studies have found evidence for an optimal size of government with respect to GDP growth. In this paper, I look at the impact of the size of government consumption expenditures on social welfare as measured by the Human Development Index. Utilizing dynamic GMM estimation in a panel data...

Existing research suggests that bureaucrats’ optimal behavior is to maximize their agency’s budgets, but does not account for information imperfections nor explore the tactics bureaucrats employ in maximizing their budgets. Drawing on the rational expectations literature, we propose a new...

Regression analysis is intended to be used when the researcher seeks to test a given hypothesis against a data set. Unfortunately, in many applications it is either not possible to specify a hypothesis, typically because the research is in a very early stage, or it is not desirable to form a...