Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

submittedVersion

Publication Date

9-2015

Abstract

How can agents in the military, who control the means of coercion, commit not to expropriate from producers? In this paper we propose competition within the military as one of the mechanisms that can deter predation and consequently create commitment. In our model, even if agents within the military could expropriate all output costlessly, it is attractive to protect producers from predating military units. This marginal defensive advantage and consequently defence is an effective way to potentially eliminate is because there is a other military units, reducing competition and leading to higher future payoffs. Our model predicts that greater internal competition within the military lowers the risk of expropriation and that this effect is strongest for countries with low institutional and economic development Testing this prediction empirically, we find a robust negative relationship between competition within the military and expropriation risk. In line with our model this effect is strongest for countries at lower stages of institutional and economic development, and it weakens as the latter improve. These results indicate that there may be a short-run component to property rights institutions that varies with the degree of competition among agents who control the means of coercion.

Keywords

Property rights, Military power, Checks and balances, Institutions

Discipline

Defense and Security Studies | Political Economy | Public Economics

Research Areas

Applied Microeconomics

Publication

European Journal of Political Economy

Volume

39

First Page

125

Last Page

149

ISSN

0176-2680

Identifier

10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2015.04.006

Publisher

Elsevier

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2015.04.006

Download

Share

COinS