Projects
Everything Mercenomics is building, with its status stated plainly. An entry becomes a link on the day it can be downloaded or read, and not before.
| Project | Kind | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Defense Base Act injury and death claims | Dataset | In preparation |
| Contractor census archive, 2007 to 2025 | Dataset | In preparation |
| Federal security contract spending | Dataset | Planned |
| Working papers on the economics of privatised force | Research | In preparation |
| Glossary of the field | Reference | Published |
| Starting library of public sources | Reference | Published |
In preparation
Defense Base Act injury and death claims
Every report the United States Department of Labor has published on injury and death claims filed by civilian workers on American government contracts overseas, stitched into one table: one row per financial year, country where the injury happened, and claim type. First, because the source files are clean and complete enough to finish properly.
Contractor census archive
Every quarterly report in which the United States Department of Defense counted contractor personnel in the Central Command area, from the fourth quarter of the 2007 financial year to the end of the series in 2025, as one machine-readable file with every break in definitions recorded. A finished archive rather than a running tracker, because the series has ended.
Full descriptions of both, with their sources and their limits, are on the Data page.
Working papers
Papers on contracting, principal-agent problems, information asymmetry in recruitment, and where the cost of outsourced military work lands. Each will be published as a preprint with its data and code, so the results can be reproduced. See Research.
Published
Glossary
Plain-English definitions of the terms these records use, grouped by the actors, the records and the economics. Written because a single misread word in this field turns a figure into a false claim. Read it.
Starting library
The public sources the figures in this field actually come from: the official records, the existing compilations, the academic datasets, and one honest piece on how hard this data is to get right. Every entry opened and checked before it was listed. Read it.
How the order was chosen
By what can be finished properly, not by what sounds most impressive. The claims table comes first because its source files can be read and checked end to end. The census archive is larger and has to be assembled from separate reports by hand. The contract spending dataset is last, because free tools already chart much of it and most of that spending is domestic guarding rather than overseas security work.
Standing commitments
- Every dataset: a documentation file naming the sources, collection dates, definitions, known gaps and limits.
- Every dataset: published under CC BY 4.0, free to download and reuse with credit.
- Every dataset that is no longer being updated: archived as a versioned file with a permanent identifier.
- Every correction: posted in the open on the Corrections page.