Joint Military Exercises Dataset

The number of joint military exercises substantially increased over the last 30 years and they now form a major part of peacetime defense cooperation. Academic work that incorporates joint military exercises, however, has been largely limited to qualitative studies due to a lack of reliable, cross national time series data. This paper introduces the Joint Military Exercises Data Set to solve this problem. I describe joint military exercises and place them in context of the growing body of work looking at non- formal alliance forms of international cooperation and signaling and I describe the data collection process. Finally, I validate the usefulness of looking at joint military exercises by showing that dyads that exercise together are associated with a decreased likelihood of engaging in militarized disputes against each other, an increased likelihood of being on the same side of a dispute, and an increase in arms sales and transfers.