In February 1998, Osama Bin Laden published a signed statement calling for a fatwa against the United States for its having 'declared war against God'. As we now know, the fatwa resulted in the unprecedented attack of 9/11. The issue of whether or not 9/11 was in any way predictable culminated...

This paper presents a simple model to characterize explicitly the role that an intervening third party plays in raising the cost of rebellion in an intrastate conflict. Extending the Gershenson-Grossman (2000) framework of conflict in a two-stage game to the case involving outside intervention...

This paper uses linear and non-linear Granger causality methods to determine the causal relationship between defense spending and economic growth in Turkey for the period 1949-2004. The innovative feature of this paper is that it provides evidence regarding the nonlinear causal dependence...

The ongoing Turkish-Greek antagonism has triggered the interest of defense economists to investigate the various aspects of the arms race between Turkey and Greece. However, empirical studies examining the long-run relationship between the military expenditures of the two countries offer little...

This paper introduces a new measure of conflict duration and argues that the number of deaths in a conflict can serve as such a measure. The paper demonstrates that there are information gains to this approach. The well-known conflict database of the International Peace Research Institute is...

Using a time series method called 'transfer function', this paper examines the effect of terrorism on tourism in Turkey. The results indicate that there exists a negative but small impact of terrorism, which is observed within approximately one year. However, terrorist attacks in Turkey have...

Frey and Rohner (2007) propose that governments credibly commit to reconstruction of cultural monuments, as this would deter terrorist attacks on monuments. We contend that precommitment will serve primarily to redirect terrorist attacks toward non-replicable targets, possibly leading to loss of...

In this paper, we employ a VAR analysis to examine the nexus between military spending and economic growth in Sri Lanka which, due to the civil war there, has witnessed a significant increase in military spending over the last three decades while also recording healthy economic growth. The study...

Transnational terrorism data are difficult to forecast because they contain an unknown number of structural breaks of unknown functional form. The rise of religious fundamentalism, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the rise of al Qaeda have changed the nature of transnational terrorism. 'Old...

In this article the effect of defense spending on aggregate output is discussed. Recent publications in this area are reviewed and new additional evidence is provided. The findings presented in this paper are supportive of the positive effect of defense spending. However, in light of the...