Research
No papers have been posted yet. This page will list each working paper with a link to the full text when it is available. Nothing is listed here before it can be read.
The question
When a government pays a private company to do military or security work instead of using its own soldiers, what changes? Not only the price: who bears the risk, who can be held to account, and what the state can do without asking anyone.
That question is the reason the datasets on this site exist. The data comes first, because an argument about this industry is worth little without figures that can be checked.
Lines of work
- Contracting and incomplete contracts
- What armed-service contracts can and cannot specify, and what happens in the gaps they leave.
- Principal-agent problems in hired force
- Why a force that is paid rather than enlisted behaves differently, and what the buyer gives up in control.
- Information asymmetry in recruitment
- What workers are told about a job, what the job turns out to be, and who profits from the gap. Much of the evidence here concerns workers recruited from South Asia.
- Where the cost lands
- Who carries the risk of outsourced military work, measured through injury and death claims set against contractor numbers.
How papers will be published
As preprints, free to read, with the data and code behind each one released alongside it so the results can be reproduced. Each will state plainly what is new and what rests on other people's work.