I investigate how the third wave of democracy influenced national defense spending by reference to a panel 110 countries over 1972–2013 period. apply new data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute on military expenditures, which has been extended years prior 1988, and four measures address differences among indices democracy. The results dynamic model suggest that democracy’s re...

Drawing on a database for 1988-2006 containing information on 157 countries, we investigate the effects on military spending of government form, electoral rules, concentration of parliamentary parties, and ideology. From an OLS regression on pooled data, our results show that presidential democracies spend more than parliamentary systems on defense, whereas the presence of a plurality voting sy...

We estimate the influence of defense spending and military labor use on economic growth in African and Latin American countries. Our model integrates disparate implications from the defense economics literature into a Barro-style model of economic growth that controls for political and economic institutional variation across countries. Our panel data analysis of 44 countries in Africa and Latin...

For U.S. annual data that include WWII, the estimated multiplier for defense spending is 0.6-0.7 at the median unemployment rate (while holding fixed average marginal income-tax rates). There is some evidence that the spending multiplier rises with the extent of economic slack and reaches 1.0 when the unemployment rate is around 12%. We cannot estimate reliable multipliers for non-defense purch...

In a two-party legislature, districts represented by the majority may receive greater funds if majority-party legislators have greater proposal power or disproportionately form coalitions with each other. Funding types received by districts may depend on their legislators’ party identity when party preferences differ. Estimates from the United States, using fixedeffect and regression-discontinu...

We develop a method for identifying and quantifying the fiscal channels that help finance government spending shocks and apply it to postwar U.S. data. We define fiscal shocks as surprises in defense spending and show that they are more precisely identified when defense stock data are used in addition to aggregate macroeconomic data. Our results show that in the postwar period, over 9% of the U...