Jim Ray and others in this issue question customary procedures for the quantitative analysis of theoretically complex questions in the social sciences. In this article we address Ray's use of research on the Kantian peace to illustrate his points. We discuss his five guidelines for research,...

We consider the influence of countries' external security environments on their military spending. We first estimate the <italic>ex ante</italic> probability that a country will become involved in a fatal militarized interstate dispute using a model of dyadic conflict that incorporates key elements of liberal...

In their article in this issue, Donald P. Green, Soo Yeon Kim, and David H. Yoon claim, contrary to liberal theory and extensive evidence, that neither joint democracy nor economic interdependence significantly reduces the frequency of militarized interstate disputes in pooled time-series...

Two studies question whether economic interdependence promotes peace, arguing that previous research has not adequately considered the endogeneity of trade. Using simultaneous equations to capture the reciprocal effects, they report that trade does not reduce conflict, though conflict reduces...