The price ADRES Best Young Paper Award 2020 was awarded to Maxime Menuet, researcher associated with the Chair of Defence Economics - IHEDN.
Maxime Menuet, research associate at the Chair of Defence Economics - IHEDN, has been awarded for a published article in the magazine Annals of Economics and Statistics. The article entitled « Is a Long War Desirable? Optimal Debt Concessions in Attrition Warfare »received the ADRES Best Young Paper Award 2020, on 29 January 2021.
This prize, awarded by the’Association for the Development of Economic and Statistical Research (ADRES), is awarded each year to an article produced by an author under the age of 40 and published during the previous year.
The article in question analyses the effect of a negotiation in a war of attrition. During such a war, the parties can negotiate by agreeing to reduce the burden of war they bear. The article applies this idea to the management of public finances in the following way by Alesina and Drazen (1991), American Economic Review. The war takes the form of a struggle between social groups over who will pay the tax burden needed to stabilise public debt. The negotiation is modelled as an agreement between these groups to reduce the level of the deficit and therefore the debt. The main result of the article is that negotiations delay debt stabilisation. By lightening the burden of war, groups find it easier to remain in the conflict.
L’application to armed conflicts is interesting. The message of the article is that in long-lasting wars, such as the conflicts pitting Western coalitions against terrorist groups in the Middle East or in Africa, the use of negotiations between belligerents can have a counterproductive effect by lengthening the period of conflict, rather than resolving the problem that caused the conflict in the first place.
