Officer Retention and Military Spending—The Rise of the Military Industrial Complex duringthe Second World War

Ahmed Rahman

Departmental Working Papers from United States Naval Academy Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper examines how the region of origin of top military personnel within the U.S. Navy contributed to military expenditures around the country. We first discuss a theory of political economy for military spending--officers who remain in service eventually can help channel military funds and em- ployment to their respective regions of origin, either through political chan- nels or difusion of military culture. Further, if officer retention is positively related to poorer economic conditions at home (fewer work opportunities at home induces greater service lengths), military spending will tend to be progressive. To test these ideas we use personnel records of officers serv- ing in the U.S. Navy from 1870 to the late 1930s. Tracking the tenure of all officers, we construct measures of "military representation" across U.S. counties. We find that naval officer representation positively and robustly predicts regional naval spending (but not spending from other branches) during World War II.

Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.usna.edu/EconDept/RePEc/usn/wp/usnawp62.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.usna.edu:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
Journal Article: Officer retention and military spending: the rise of the military‐industrial complex during the Second World War (2020)
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:usn:usnawp:62

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from United States Naval Academy Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().