This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengths of this approach are compared to traditional approaches and identification issues are addressed. Moreover, it is applied to estimate utility losses cause...

This paper discusses a novel approach to elicit people’s preferences for public goods, namely the life satisfaction approach. Reported subjective well-being data are used to directly evaluate utility consequences of public goods. The strengths of this approach are compared to traditional approaches and identification issues are addressed. Moreover, it is applied to estimate utility losses cause...

This paper extends the club model of religion to better account for observed patterns of extremism. We adapt existing models to a multi-agent framework and analyze the distribution of agents and clubs. We find that extremism is more successful when religious groups are able to produce close substitutes for standard goods and that increased access to publicly provided goods can reduce the extrem...

The U.S. military, despite spending over $13 billion, appears powerless to stop the Iraqi insurgency’s improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which cause most of the military’s casualties and prevent victory by showing lawlessness and insecurity. However, this view ignores substitution effects we consider here. Using rational choice and expectations models, we find a backward-bending supply curve...

The end of the Cold War led to a large drop in world military expenditure, rising fixed costs of developing weapons because of technological changes and a reduction of national preference for domestic weapons. Alongside these developments has been an increase in concentration in the world arms industry, which at the end of the Cold War had been very unconcentrated with concentration ratios clos...

Factors shaping international migration, over the last half century, from and into the countries and territories of Sub-Saharan and North Africa, as well as the economic and some social implications of those movements, are examined. Existing analyses of these issues are critically reviewed, including topics particularly pertinent to the African context and evidence on crosscutting themes studie...

Abstract Using new data at the police department level, I propose an identification strategy for estimating causal effect that militarization has on reducing violent crime. show previous estimates are likely to be contaminated by unobserved factors simultaneously determine and Upon addressing this issue, find a point estimate is 20 times larger than those estimated previously. then one-fourth o...

The recombinant fusion proteins hybrid 1 [H1 (Ag85B-ESAT-6)] and hybrid 56 [H56 (Ag85B-ESAT-6-Rv2660c)] derived from Mycobacterium tuberculosis are promising antigens for subunit vaccines against tuberculosis. Both antigens are early batches of antigens to be enrolled in human clinical trials and it is therefore important to characterize their conformational stability in solution as well as upo...

The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are surveyed and put in perspective. As economic consequences are only a part of the overall costs of terrorism, possible approaches for estimating the utility los...

Since Adam Smith, most economists have held that a professional army is superior to a conscript army, thanks to benefiting from comparative advantage and specialization. We summarize recent literature on the benefits and costs of military draft, with a special emphasis on its dynamic effects on human capital formation. Empirical evidence refutes the claim that the economic costs of the draft wo...