Defense spending accounts for a large share of the budget in many countries, but the value of the resulting public good - national defense - has so far escaped assessment. Much of the literature has instead considered indirect benefits of defense spending in terms of greater economic growth or...

In this chapter we present the main characteristics and problems involved in the study of the arms trade: product definition and data, strategic aspects of the arms trade and regulation. We illustrate these aspects using the latest theoretical and empirical literature on arms trade. The papers...

Systemic risk - the possibility that an individual firm's failure will result in broad damages to the economy as a whole - is the epitome of financial crisis. Bailouts of troubled firms have long been the standard response to systemic risk. Yet, bailouts suffer from problems of political...