The end of the Cold War has increased the relative importance of economic causes and consequences of arms transfers. Unfortunately, there is surprisingly little theoretical and empirical development of the economics of arms trade, making it a sub-field of defense economics ripe for foundational...

This paper extends the results of Rodrik (1998), Alesina and Wacziarg (1998), Ram (2009), Jetter and Parmeter (2015), Musau (2018) and other replication studies by providing dynamic panel estimates of the influence of country size and openness on government size. The estimates suggest that past...

This paper shows that smaller countries have larger public sectors as a share of GDP, and are also more open to trade. These empirical observations are consistent with recent theoretical models explaining country formation and break up