Essays on political economy of conflict and growth

Today and throughout history, two activities use much of the world's resources and effort: competition and conflict. Conflict as a strategic interaction amongst rational agents is of interest to game theory. At the same time, whether interstate or intrastate, conflict is an activity which consumes resources and affects total production. This twofold relation between conflict and economics connects my three essays on the Political Economy of Conflict and Growth. The first essay, Economic Growth and Defense Spending in the U.S, explores the economic effects of defense spending in the United States. The time series paper shows that different components of defense expenditure have different economic effects. In other words, the growth effects of defense outlays differ by type. Its effects are negative for some outlays, and positive for others. In single country studies, the paper's result cautions against aggregating across different categories of military expenditures. The results are also applicable to cross sectional studies empirical work.;My second essay, Generic Stability of Economic Equilibria, is theoretical. Using singularity theory, this paper explores the generic properties of Nash, Walrasian, and other economic equilibria. The results show that for any game among finite number of players with differentiable utility functions, Nash equilibria and Walrasian market equilibria are isolated points. The paper examines the effects of equity based refinements like envy free points and egalitarian equivalence. The results show that there are special examples where equilibria exist but not generically. The results of this paper are applicable to the effects of strong dependence amongst market agents. The results of this paper extend to shed light on the complexity of computation.;My third essay, The Dynamics of Power in Political Systems, is a dynamic synthesis of static political-economic analysis of power relations among the people, the ruler, and the elite. After deriving more general sufficient conditions, the essay assumes these, now generalized, results of other papers in the literature that people's need for security empowers the elite and the ruler and that the self-interested elite and ruler will not allow a weak population to regain any power. The essay consolidates the literature of political economy while providing a global perspective. The results show a global attractor wherein only the ruler and the elite share power. The paper also relaxes these assumptions and finds different local and global equilibria.