Does trade promote peace? squared: a gravity equation in a rectangular panel world

The purpose of this paper is to revisit the question if trade promotes peace or not? I account for heterogeneity of trade dyads over time in using panel estimation techniques. The world is modeled as a rectangle. I present models focusing on how conflict affects trade, and in another set of models how trade affects conflict. To account for simultaneity I use past values of trade and conflict, as well an instrumental variable approach. My instruments to explain conflict are military expenditures and a military capability index. The instrumental variable to explain trade is annual rainfall. I find in most setups that trade and interstate conflict are reciprocal. Trade indeed promotes peace because of welfare gained from international trade. Past values of conflict or trade have a negative impact in their respective models. Only after accounting for endogeneity in using an instrumental variable approach, the negative relationship becomes insignificant or positive in some setups. I employ a dynamic panel estimator to deal with possible limitations of the instrumental variables.Trade, Conflicts, GDP, Gravity model

Scherzo

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-ps/1642/thumbnail.jp

Issues Players Face with the Collective Bargaining Process

This presentation was originally delivered at the DePaul Journal of Sports Law & Contemporary Problems 2012 Symposium

Three Essays on the Economic Costs of Armed Conflict

This dissertation consists of three essays on the economic cost of armed conflict. The first essay focuses on the impact of an armed conflict on children\u27s health. The exposure to violence in utero and early in life has adverse impacts on children\u27s age-adjusted height. Using the experience of the Kashmir insurgency, I find that children more affected by the insurgency are 0.9 to 1.4 standard deviations shorter compared with children less affected by the insurgency. The effect is larger for children born during peaks in violence. Also, children affected by the insurgency are more likely to be sick in the two weeks prior to the survey. The second essay analyzes the effect of an armed conflict on education of women. Armed conflicts tend to reduce educational outcomes of groups more affected by violence compared with groups less affected by violence. The Kashmir insurgency is different from previous examples that I find an insignificant effect of the insurgency on years of schooling. There are two reasons for this finding. First, improvements in the educational sector in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the 1980s and 1990s continue to work during the insurgency. Second, the Indian government dealt with the insurgency by sending in tens of thousands security forces to break down any form of rebellion. The third essay explores the relationship between (armed) conflict and trade. Modeling the world as n*n dyadic country relationships, I account for heterogeneity of conflict dyads over time using panel estimation techniques and estimate the relationship between trade and conflict. The simultaneity in the trade-peace relationships is solved by using an instrumental variable approach. I find in most setups that trade promotes peace. After accounting for endogeneity, however, the relationship between trade and conflict reverses in sign in some setups, but remains negative once focusing only on bilateral conflict with actual battle deaths

Progressive Policy-Making on the Local Level: Rethinking Traditional Notions of Federalism

Due, in part, to Justice Brandeis\u27 famous dissent, many have presumed that the states are the most fertile ground for policy innovation. However, with their transformation from smaller urban and rural centers to major metropolitan regions, local governments may prove even more fruitful agents of social change and laboratories for policy experimentation. Indeed, local governments are critical components of our federal system and embody the values of federalism both in theory and practice. Local governments have trailblazed in legal and policy arenas where the federal and state governments could not (or would not) engage: gay rights and gay marriage, campaign finance and other electoral reforms, climate change, illegal immigration ordinances, and living wage laws, to name but a few. Yet local governments\u27 powers are drastically limited by a perhaps overzealous preemption doctrine. This, in turn, thwarts local governments\u27 ability to serve as effective laboratories for democracy and policy innovation. This preemption doctrine also may run afoul of the original intent of the home rule movement in state and local government law. Accordingly, this Article questions the wisdom of the current preemption doctrine that limits local governments\u27 ability to serve as Petri dishes for innovative policies that might translate well to the state and federal levels of government