Borrowed Power: War Finance and the Resort to Arms

当路易十二在1499年考虑入侵米兰时，流亡者特里武齐奥指出，要想在战争中取得成功，“三件事是必要的：钱;更多的钱;还有更多的钱。“如果这种说法是真的，那么在现代，一支有能力的军队的保养费用非常昂贵，情况就更是如此。 战争财政的方法影响着战争的时间和方式，以及战争的解决条件。然而，大多数国际冲突理论都奇怪地脱离了这一点。 最普遍的解释是，权力的分配-受金融影响的东西-是固定的，或者说，权力的动态不受行为者的控制。 即使是最近允许行为者改变权力分配的理论，也没有审查他们的努力是如何获得资金的。 这个项目是第一个研究金融形式如何影响战争的开始、持续时间和结果的项目。 正如初步工作所显示的那样，主权债务特有的特点改变了谈判和平条件的动态，战争一旦开始，可能持续更长时间，更难解决。 战争财政不是战争的一个无害的方面，而应被视为解决和持久冲突的一个重要原因。 该项目旨在推广一个博弈论模型，可用于研究资源贫乏的行为者与外国金融市场之间的相互作用，确定政府债务成本的金融和政治制度的影响，以及吸引国内外贷款人的方法。 从这个模型中得出的假设将被用来检验与上述因素有关的假设。 除了生成模型及其影响外，还将创建一个关于1815年至今各国债务融资的数据集。 该数据集将用于测试模型，并将提供给可能研究类似主题的其他学者。 这项研究的结果也将提供给对国家安全问题感兴趣的政策制定者。对战争财政的研究，特别是对政府如何筹集收入以资助其军事开支以及这如何影响其军事努力的研究，可能会引起一般政治学家的兴趣。也感谢那些对战争如何塑造一个国家的政治经济感兴趣但很少提出本项目所要解决的问题的经济学家和社会学家。 这些项目也是现代战争理论发展的下一个步骤，这些理论使权力分配内在化。 该项目的影响可能是变革性的，因为该项目表明，因果机制不能孤立于金融结构进行研究。

When Louis XII contemplated the invasion of Milan in 1499, the exile Trivulzio pointed that out for success in war, "three things are necessary: money; more money; and still more money." If that statement was true then, it is even more the case in modern times with the extraordinarily, expensive upkeep of a capable military. The method of war finance affects when and how wars are fought, and on what terms they are settled. Yet most theories of international conflict are oddly divorced from this. The most widespread explanations assume that the distribution of power - the very thing that is affected by finance - is fixed or that its dynamics are outside the control of the actors. Even recent theorites that do allow actors to alter the distribution of power do not examine how their efforts are funded. This project is one of the first to examine how the form of finance can affect the initiation, duration, and outcome of war. As shown in preliminary work, features specific to sovereign debt cobine to change the dynamics of bargaining over peace terms in a way that wars, once begun, can last longer and be harder to settle. War finance is not an innocuous aspect of war, but should be regarded as an important cause of both settlement and protracted conflict. This project aims to generalize a game-theoretic model that can be used to study interactions between resource-poor actors with access to foreign financial markets, the effects of financial and political systems that determine the costs of government debt, and the methods of attracting lendors, both domestic and foreign. Hypotheses derived from this model will then be used to to test hypotheses concerning the factors mentioned above. Besides generating the model and its implications, a data set will be created concerning debt financing for countries from 1815 to the present. This dataset will be used to test the model and will also be made available to other scholars who might be studying similar topics. The reuslts of this research will aslo be made available to policy makers who are interested in issues of national security.The study of war finance, especially of how governments raise revenue to fund their military expenses and how this affects their military efforts, is likely to be of interest to political scientists in general, but also to economists and sociologists who have been interested in how war shapes the political economy of a state but rarely raised the questions addressed in this project. The projects is also the next step in the development of modern theories of war which have endogenized the distribution of power. The impact of the project is potentially transformative because the project suggests the causation mechanism can not be studied in isolation from financial structures.