Topher L Mcdougal
Biographic Data
| ID | 1644413 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Topher L Mcdougal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Topher L |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcdougal |
| SIGNATURE | MCDOUGAL T L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1079-0670 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Leviathans and Liberation
We test the hypothesis slavery started declining in the United States not due to fossil fuel-driven industrialization but the exploitation of the bioenergy reserves of the world's largest animals. We predict the population in slavery in US states from 1790 to 1840 as a function of the recorded whaling harvest. We find strong evidence across all models, controlling for various economic and political changes, state-specific idiosyncrasies and endog…
Modeling the U.S. Firearms Market
We estimate the first econometric model of the national civilian firearms market in the United States (1946–2016), where per capita firearms‐related harm is exceptionally high. Solving simultaneous equation models instrumented by natural disasters and steel prices, and employing unique firearms prices and quantities data, we find this market operates normally, except that firearms stocks may generate some new market demand in a positive feedback …
The global financial burden of humanitarian disasters
Bioeconomic Peace Research and Policy
We argue for viewing COVID-19 as an additional instance of bioeconomic interaction in an ongoing history of human relations with the rest of nature. We assert that COVID-19 and other increasingly frequent zoonotic pandemic diseases are a further example of global public bads (GPBs), which are collectively provoking the transition from an extensive to an intensive economic growth model characterized by the provision of corresponding global public …
Mapping the patchwork
Despite dramatic reductions in child marriage over the past decade, more than one in four girls in India still marry before reaching age 18. This practice is driven by a complex interplay of social and normative beliefs and values that are inadequately represented in national- or even state-level analyses of the drivers of child marriage. A geographic lens was employed to assess variations in child marriage prevalence across Indian districts, ide…
The Political Economy of Rural-Urban Conflict
In some cases of insurgency, the combat frontier is contested and erratic, as rebels target cities as their economic prey. In other cases, it is tidy and stable, seemingly representing an equilibrium in which cities are effectively protected from violent non-state actors. What factors account for these differences in the interface urban-based states and rural-based challengers? To explore this question, this book examines two regions representing…
Stateless State-Led Industrialization
What befalls economies that descend into violence? This chapter suggests that the splintered trade networks described in Chapter 2 effectively forced firms in Liberia to localize many of their inputs and to internalize many of the functions that would otherwise be external—imitating the effects of import-substitution and state-led industrialization policies. Specifically, the war economy in Liberia mimicked import tariffs, localized the staffs of…
Production and Predation
This chapter will outline some conceptual frameworks for understanding why and under what circumstances rural dwellers might take up their pitchforks against urban centers. Section 2.1 establishes common definitions of the terms and concepts employed. Section 2.2 explains the advantages of using a production network lens to examine the economy. Section 2.3 places the following chapters in a unifying theoretical framework, introduce the role of th…
How Production Networks Adapted to Civil War in Liberia
This chapter argues that firms in Liberia during the civil wars increasingly came to rely upon highly dispersed networks of traders to source from, and distribute to, rural hinterlands. Industrial manufacturing firms in Liberia shed important light on the structure of production networks in violent conflict. They serve as important nodes in the value-adding process that supply and distribution networks hook into, and their managers therefore have…
Interstitial Economies
The first conclusion chapter draws out the implications of Chapter 7 more fully, putting them in comparative perspective with the lessons drawn from the West African cases. In particular, it draws an explicit link between transportation networks (the “hardware” of rural–urban trade) and the social systems that inform trade relations (the “software”). This chapter argues that ranked-society trade networks may be better able to exploit redundant tr…
Is there a relationship between wartime violence and postwar agricultural development outcomes? The case of concessions and community grants in Mozambique
The Way of the Gun
The volume of firearms sold in USA and trafficked across the US–Mexico border is notoriously difficult to estimate. We consider a unique approach using GIS-generated county-level panel data (1993–1999 and 2010–2012) of Federal Firearms Licenses to sell small arms (FFLs) to estimate the realized demand for firearms based on the distance by road from the nearest point on the US–Mexico border. We use a time-series negative binomial model paired with…
Law of the Landless
Tenuous land access contributes to food and livelihood insecurity, and fuels conflicts in many rural societies. In such cases, the ability of government legal institutions to structure and ultimately transform the conflict depends not just on the adoption of laws favorable to progressive land redistribution, but also the effective implementation of those laws in the face of elite influence in local government. This paper presents a case study of …
The Way of the Gun
The volume of firearms sold in USA and trafficked across the US–Mexico border is notoriously difficult to estimate. We consider a unique approach using GIS-generated county-level panel data (1993–1999 and 2010–2012) of Federal Firearms Licenses to sell small arms (FFLs) to estimate the realized demand for firearms based on the distance by road from the nearest point on the US–Mexico border. We use a time-series negative binomial model paired with…
Law of the Landless
Tenuous land access contributes to food and livelihood insecurity, and fuels conflicts in many rural societies. In such cases, the ability of government legal institutions to structure and ultimately transform the conflict depends not just on the adoption of laws favorable to progressive land redistribution, but also the effective implementation of those laws in the face of elite influence in local government. This paper presents a case study of …
Law of the Landless
Tenuous land access contributes to food and livelihood insecurity, and fuels conflicts in many rural societies. In such cases, the ability of government legal institutions to structure and ultimately transform the conflict depends not just on the adoption of laws favorable to progressive land redistribution, but also the effective implementation of those laws in the face of elite influence in local government. This paper presents a case study of …
The Way of the Gun
The volume of firearms sold in USA and trafficked across the US–Mexico border is notoriously difficult to estimate. We consider a unique approach using GIS-generated county-level panel data (1993–1999 and 2010–2012) of Federal Firearms Licenses to sell small arms (FFLs) to estimate the realized demand for firearms based on the distance by road from the nearest point on the US–Mexico border. We use a time-series negative binomial model paired with…
Is there a relationship between wartime violence and postwar agricultural development outcomes? The case of concessions and community grants in Mozambique
The Political Economy of Rural-Urban Conflict
In some cases of insurgency, the combat frontier is contested and erratic, as rebels target cities as their economic prey. In other cases, it is tidy and stable, seemingly representing an equilibrium in which cities are effectively protected from violent non-state actors. What factors account for these differences in the interface urban-based states and rural-based challengers? To explore this question, this book examines two regions representing…
Stateless State-Led Industrialization
What befalls economies that descend into violence? This chapter suggests that the splintered trade networks described in Chapter 2 effectively forced firms in Liberia to localize many of their inputs and to internalize many of the functions that would otherwise be external—imitating the effects of import-substitution and state-led industrialization policies. Specifically, the war economy in Liberia mimicked import tariffs, localized the staffs of…
Production and Predation
This chapter will outline some conceptual frameworks for understanding why and under what circumstances rural dwellers might take up their pitchforks against urban centers. Section 2.1 establishes common definitions of the terms and concepts employed. Section 2.2 explains the advantages of using a production network lens to examine the economy. Section 2.3 places the following chapters in a unifying theoretical framework, introduce the role of th…
How Production Networks Adapted to Civil War in Liberia
This chapter argues that firms in Liberia during the civil wars increasingly came to rely upon highly dispersed networks of traders to source from, and distribute to, rural hinterlands. Industrial manufacturing firms in Liberia shed important light on the structure of production networks in violent conflict. They serve as important nodes in the value-adding process that supply and distribution networks hook into, and their managers therefore have…
Interstitial Economies
The first conclusion chapter draws out the implications of Chapter 7 more fully, putting them in comparative perspective with the lessons drawn from the West African cases. In particular, it draws an explicit link between transportation networks (the “hardware” of rural–urban trade) and the social systems that inform trade relations (the “software”). This chapter argues that ranked-society trade networks may be better able to exploit redundant tr…
Bioeconomic Peace Research and Policy
We argue for viewing COVID-19 as an additional instance of bioeconomic interaction in an ongoing history of human relations with the rest of nature. We assert that COVID-19 and other increasingly frequent zoonotic pandemic diseases are a further example of global public bads (GPBs), which are collectively provoking the transition from an extensive to an intensive economic growth model characterized by the provision of corresponding global public …
Mapping the patchwork
Despite dramatic reductions in child marriage over the past decade, more than one in four girls in India still marry before reaching age 18. This practice is driven by a complex interplay of social and normative beliefs and values that are inadequately represented in national- or even state-level analyses of the drivers of child marriage. A geographic lens was employed to assess variations in child marriage prevalence across Indian districts, ide…
The global financial burden of humanitarian disasters
Modeling the U.S. Firearms Market
We estimate the first econometric model of the national civilian firearms market in the United States (1946–2016), where per capita firearms‐related harm is exceptionally high. Solving simultaneous equation models instrumented by natural disasters and steel prices, and employing unique firearms prices and quantities data, we find this market operates normally, except that firearms stocks may generate some new market demand in a positive feedback …
Leviathans and Liberation
We test the hypothesis slavery started declining in the United States not due to fossil fuel-driven industrialization but the exploitation of the bioenergy reserves of the world's largest animals. We predict the population in slavery in US states from 1790 to 1840 as a function of the recorded whaling harvest. We find strong evidence across all models, controlling for various economic and political changes, state-specific idiosyncrasies and endog…
Political science (10 works) · Economics (9 works) · Geography (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Business (5 works) · Biology (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Development economics (3 works) · Economic geography (3 works) · Economic growth (3 works)