Four Essays on Defense and Peace Economics

The dissertation consists of four chapters on defense and peace economics related to peacekeeping operation, terrorism, and military expenditure. The first essay studies the decisionmaking process within peacekeeping operations regarding the timing of peacekeeper deployment. This study finds that countries that could deploy more troops at their initial time of deployment and that have many previous UN PKO experiences are more likely to be leaders. Results also suggest that contributors engaging in multiple UN PKOs contemporaneously are less likely to be leaders. The second essay analyzes the effectiveness of PKOs. If the transitions from peace to conflict or from conflict to peace are correlated based on grievances or war weariness, then a multi-transition survival analysis provides more efficient estimates and may limit bias. Our analysis shows that estimates of the two transitions display a significant negative covariance. We find that UN peace enforcement missions appear to induce a transition from conflict to peace, while UN observation, traditional peacekeeping, and peacebuilding missions appear to limit a transition from peace to conflict. We also show that UN troops, rather than UN police, are more effective in transitioning from conflict to peace and in maintaining peace. With the multi-transition approach, UN PKOs performed better than non-UN PKOs in maintaining peace. In the third chapter, it studies the relationship between foreign aids and the failure of terrorist groups. This conflict aid presents recipient countries with perverse incentives because the aid ends once resident groups are removed. We introduce other empirical and conceptual innovations for analyzing military-aid-induced moral hazard. In the case of US aid recipients, the longevity of resident terrorist groups rose dramatically. The current article improves on the empirics of the pioneering article (Bapat, 2011) by showing that the moral-hazard concerns extend to other major donors – the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The last chapter revisits NATO burden sharing during 2011-2017. Russian nationalism, enhanced transnational terrorism, and intrastate conflicts are apt to increase the publicness of NATO defense spending over the last eight years. When NATO allies’ defense shares of GDP are correlated with their GDP ranks, there is clear evidence of the exploitation of the large, rich allies by the small, poor allies, indicative of allies sharing purely public defense spending since 2011. In addition, there is an absence of concordance between NATO allies’ defense burdens and their derived benefit shares, consistent with greater defense publicness. Finally, we find further proof of exploitation and free riding for a broad-based measure of security spending.