Education and military rivalry

Philippe Aghion, Xavier Jaravel, Torsten Persson and Dorothee Rouzet

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: What makes countries engage in reforms of mass education? Motivated by historical evidence on the relation between military threats and expansions of primary education, we assemble a panel dataset from the last 150 years in European countries and from the postwar period in a large set of countries. We uncover three stylized facts: (i) investments in education are associated with military threats, (ii) democratic institutions are negatively correlated with education investments, and (iii) education investments respond more strongly to military threats in democracies. These patterns continue to hold when we exploit rivalries in a country’s neighborhood as an alternative source of variation. We develop a theoretical model that rationalizes the three empirical findings. The model has an additional prediction about investments in physical infrastructures, which finds support in the data.

JEL-codes: H56 I20 N30 N40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2019-04-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Published in Journal of the European Economic Association, 1, April, 2019, 17(2), pp. 376 – 412. ISSN: 1542-4766

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/87655/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Education and Military Rivalry (2019)
Working Paper: Education and Military Rivalry (2019)
Working Paper: Education and Military Rivalry (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:87655

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