‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy: On the construction of macro panel datasets in conflict and peace economics

Vanessa A. Boese () and Katrin Kamin
Additional contact information
Vanessa A. Boese: School of Business and Economics, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

Economics of Peace and Security Journal, 2019, vol. 14, issue 1, 5-26

Abstract: The empirical analysis of datasets covering a large number of countries and time periods has become an integral part of conflict and peace economics. As such, numerous studies examine relationships between and among macroeconomic, political, and conflict variables and this often involves the merging of disparate datasets to combine relevant variables for which the country unit of analysis, however, is not necessarily the same. This article highlights difficulties in the data merging process and, by way of example, presents detailed country coding unit comparison for two economic (UN Comtrade and World Development Indicators), two democracy (Polity IV and V-Dem), and two conflict datasets (UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset and COW Militarized Interstate Disputes Dataset). We find that merging datasets can result in the elimination of very large numbers of observations due to unmergeable records and that dropped observations often include the very countries or territorial entities most of interest in conflict and peace economics.

Keywords: Comparative economic history; international economic history; multicountry studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 N40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.epsjournal.org.uk/index.php/EPSJ/article/view/310 (application/pdf)
Open access 24 months after original publication.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:epc:journl:v:14:y:2019:i:1:p:5-26

DOI: 10.15355/epsj.14.1.5

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Peace and Security Journal is currently edited by Michael Brown and J Paul Dunne

More articles in Economics of Peace and Security Journal from EPS Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael Brown, Managing Editor, EPSJ ().