U.S. Military Production Data from World War II

This dataset supports research on the relationship between demand stimulation and cost reduction during U.S. military production in World War II. It is described as an unprecedentedly large collection of data, compiled by François Lafond for a replication package. The analysis uses this data to quantify the roles of exogenous technological progress and endogenous production experience effects.

Use Cases

• Analyze the correlation between production and cumulative production to study endogenous learning effects.
• Investigate the relationship between time and unit costs to measure exogenous technological progress.
• Use the weak correlation between production, cumulative production, and time to limit issues of reverse causality in econometric models.
• Study the exogeneity of demand for military products as a natural experiment for production scaling.

Strengths

• Described as an unprecedentedly large collection of data on the topic.
• Focuses on U.S. military production, a period with largely exogenous demand.
• Data structure is designed to limit issues of reverse causality and multicollinearity.

Limitations

• Specific data dimensions like row count, column names, and file formats are unknown.
• The dataset's scope is historical and may not generalize to other contexts or time periods.
• As an archival replication package, the raw data structure and required preprocessing steps are not detailed.

Provenance

Source

ICPSR Harvested Dataverse

Collection Method

Archival replication package for the associated research paper.

Time Range

World War II period

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-02-23.

Geography

United States