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Do United Nations peacekeeping operations improve the security of humanitarian aid workers during conflict? Answering this question is important given the critical assistance that humanitarian personnel provide in conflict zones, the increased integration of humanitarian activities in UN operations in recent decades and the growing incidence of attacks against aid workers worldwide. Researchers have found that the presence of peacekeepers does not positively affect aid worker security and may even make humanitarian personnel more vulnerable to violent attacks. However, previous studies have not examined whether the effect of peacekeeping operations on aid worker security is influenced by the personnel composition of UN missions. I hypothesize that operations with more troops are likely to reduce attacks against aid workers, while similar security gains are unlikely to be realized with larger numbers of police or observers. This is due to troops' specific capabilities, which increase their ability to mitigate high-intensity conflict environments and protect humanitarian personnel traveling on roads. Statistical analyses of monthly data between 2000 and 2015 indicate that greater numbers of UN troops, but not police and observers, are correlated with fewer attacks against aid workers. The implications of these findings are discussed, with an eye toward addressing challenges facing the UN's force-generation process.

Do democratic or non-democratic countries contribute more personnel to UN peacekeeping operations? While earlier studies found that democracies make larger contributions than non-democracies, recent research has challenged these findings. Scholarship in this area, however, has largely conceived of 'non-democracy' as a monolithic category, despite a growing body of research delineating distinct types of illiberal regimes and identifying their divergent behaviours in a range of domestic and international contexts. In this article, I argue that non-democracies' personnel contributions to peacekeeping operations vary based on different 'type' of illiberal regime, and that this variation is contingent on two main factors: the influence of the military within the regime, and the extent to which a regime values the prestige associated with large-scale peacekeeping contributions. I test this proposition by statistically analyzing data from UN peacekeeping operations between 1991–2018. The findings indicate that single-party regimes are likely to make significantly smaller contributions than democracies; the contribution behaviour of other types of non-democracies is less discernible from their democratic counterparts.

This paper examines the participation of human rights-abusing countries in UN peacekeeping operations. This seemingly growing occurrence raises questions given the UN's emphasis in recent decades on protecting the physical integrity of civilians. How extensive are the contributions of human rights-violators in UN peacekeeping operations? And, what explains this phenomenon? I posit that peacekeeping provision serves two important functions for human rights abusers. First, committing large numbers of peacekeeping personnel helps states to whitewash poor domestic human rights records. Second, by contributing to the provision of an underprovided public good, human rights abusers can extort the international community to prevent interference in their domestic activities. Analysis of data from 1991–2011 shows that human rights abusers make substantially greater contributions to peacekeeping operations, even when holding constant variables such as regime type and wealth. These findings have significant implications for the protection of human rights, both in states that host and contribute peacekeepers.

To what extent do peacekeeper fatalities affect states' contributions to UN operations? While the deaths of peacekeepers are thought to be a factor in states' decisions to reduce the magnitude of their participation in a mission, not all states respond similarly to peacekeeper fatalities. I hypothesize that democracies and wealthy countries are likely to be more sensitive to peacekeeper deaths than their non-democratic and poorer counterparts. Analyses of UN peacekeeping operations between 1990 and 2011 confirm that peacekeeper fatalities generally have a negative effect upon the size of countries' contributions to peacekeeping operations, and that wealthy countries are likely to make larger decreases to their contributions than poorer countries. There is less evidence, however, that democracies are more sensitive to peacekeeper fatalities than non-democracies.

"This paper documents the evolution of long-run inflation expectations and models the stance of monetary policy from 1965 to 1980. A host of survey-based measures and financial market data indicate that long-run inflation expectations rose markedly from 1965 to 1969, leveled off in the mid-1970s, and then rose at an alarming pace from 1977 to 1980. While previous studies have shown that the trajectory of the federal funds rate over that period is not well-represented by a Taylor rule with a constant inflation goal, our analysis indicates that the path of policy can be characterized by a reaction function with two breaks in the interception 1970 and 1976 that correspond to discrete shifts in an implicit inflation goal. This reaction function implies that a series of stop-start episodes occurred in 1968-70, 1974-76, and 1979-80. In each episode, policy fell behind the curve by allowing a pickup in inflation before tightening belatedly, and then the subsequent contraction in economic activity led to policy easing before inflation had been brought back down to its previous level. The evidence presented in this paper raises serious doubts about several prominent theories of the Great Inflation and suggests that a simple rule with an explicit inflation goal could serve as a useful benchmark for avoiding its recurrence"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site