Education and Military Rivalry

By Philippe Aghion, Torsten Persson, Dorothée Rouzet. Journal of the European Economic Association, 2018

121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using data from the last 150 years in a small set of countries, and from the postwar period in a large set of countries, we show that large investments in state primary education systems tend to occur when countries face military rivals or threats from their neighbors. By contrast, we find that democratic transitions are negatively associated with education investments, while the presence of democratic political institutions magnifies the positive effect of military rivalries. These empirical results are robust to a number of statistical concerns and continue to hold when we instrument military rivalries with commodity prices or rivalries in a certain country's immediate neighborhood. We also present historical case studies, as well as a simple model, that are consistent with the econometric evidence.

Subfields: Demography, Development, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55413a17bc8cceff3ba363efe7063829b482dc31

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Citations in the corpus

State Capacity and Long-Run Economic Performance (2016, unknown): “For example, historical central government investments in mass primary education promoted common national languages and cultural identities (Lindert, 2004, Aghion et al., 2012), which could have facilitated trade and innovation.”
Wealth Inequality and Democracy (2017, background): “Other recent studies have also concluded that democracy does not cause important wealth-equalizing policies to be adopted; Mares & Queralt (2015) look at the income tax and Aghion et al. (2012) at education.”