Is Happiness Really a Warm Gun? The Consequences of US Weapons Sales for Political Violence

Senior Lecturer(with tenure) at Department of Economics, University of Melbourne. He earned his PhD of Economics from University of Toronto in 2010. His research fields include Development Economics, Political Economics, Economics of Conflict and Applied Microeconomics.

Please see Prof. Swee's CV for more information.

We exploit exogenous shifts in the cost of purchasing commercial weapons from the U.S. to uncover the causal effect of U.S. weapons purchases on political violence. We find that weapons purchases reduce the likelihood of political repression but increase the likelihood of onset of civil war in purchasing countries. The results suggest that state investment in military capability incites civil war in countries where state repression of an aggrieved opposition would have otherwise prevailed.