Innovation and Threats

Matthew Brummer

Defence and Peace Economics, 2022, vol. 33, issue 5, 563-584

Abstract: All major research programs that study technological change find common ground in emphasizing the explanatory significance of domestic institutions in determining national innovation rates. And yet, after decades of research, this domestic-centered approach has yet to identify any particular set of institutions or policies that explain variation in innovative performance over time and across cases. Recently, a new research program has emerged which argues that this bottleneck to theory development is due to a critical omitted variable bias: international security. This article probes one facet of this argument by examining the relationship between international threat environments and national innovation rates. The regression results show a positive effect of threats on national innovation, a finding that is robust across different specifications and periods of analysis. Additionally, unlike previous studies that find no significant relationship between security alliances and military innovation, the opposite is true of threat: states faced with high external threat environments tend to innovate at the defense technology frontier.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10242694.2020.1853984 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:defpea:v:33:y:2022:i:5:p:563-584

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/GDPE20

DOI: 10.1080/10242694.2020.1853984

Access Statistics for this article

Defence and Peace Economics is currently edited by Professor Keith Hartley

More articles in Defence and Peace Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().