education poverty and terrorism is there a causal connection the paper investigates whether there is a connection between poverty or low education and terrorism we review evidence on hate crimes which are closely related to terrorism the occurrence of hate crimes is largely independent of economic conditions we analyze data on support for attacks against israeli targets from public opinion polls conducted in the west bank and gaza strip support for violent attacks does not decrease among those with higher education and higher living standards the core contribution of the paper is a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in hezbollah militant activities having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary or higher education is positively associated with participation in hezbollah we also find that israeli jewish settlers who attacked palestinians in the west bank in the early 1980s were overwhelmingly from high paying occupations although our results are tentative and exploratory they suggest that neither poverty nor education has a direct causal impact on terrorism

to bargain or not to bargain that is the question we use economic analysis in a simple game theory framework to ascertain under what circumstances a government would want to precommit itself to a no negotiation strategy from the government viewpoint we examine both the choice of deterrence expenditure i e expense meant to reduce terrorist logistical success during incidents and whether to negotiate or not this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

conciliation counterterrorism and patterns of terrorist violence what causes the increase in terrorism that reportedly often follows gov ernment concessions given this pattern why do governments ever conciliate terror ists i propose a model in which terrorist organizations become more militant following concessions because only moderate terrorists accept them leaving extremists in con trol governments nonetheless are willing to make concessions because their coun terterror capabilities improve because of the collusion of former terrorists former terrorists undertake this collusion to insure the credibility of government promises the model also yields hypotheses regarding the level of government investment in counterterror when moderates accept concessions the terms of negotiated settle ments the duration of terrorist conflicts incentives for moderate terrorists to radical ize their followers and incentives for governments to encourage extremist challenges to moderate terrorist leaders the model is illustrated with an application to the israeli0 palestinian conflict

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

placement service and offer arrival rates abstract determinants of job referrals by the austrian employment exchange are analyzed concentrating on three issues the validity of the poisson assumption allocation strategies of scarce vacancies and the stationarity of offer arrival rates over time

the impact of coalition offensive operations on the iraqi insurgency coalition offensive operations in iraq seek to disrupt insurgents and their networks but may also act as a recruitment tool for the insurgency we use data from coalition press releases and casualty reports to assess the total impact of these operations we find that two additional offensive operations come at a future cost of an additional coalition soldier s life the evidence suggests that rather than diminishing the insurgents appetite to wage counterattacks these operations may act as a recruitment tool for the insurgency we further find that while the insurgents change their level of operations in response to the coalition the coalition does not react to the insurgents

can student effort be manipulated does it matter this article provides evidence that college students effort can be manipulated substantially by making changes in the college testing regime and moreover that student effort is a meaningful input in education production the evidence comes from a quasi experiment where a mid semester test with a pass requirement is introduced to a mandatory one semester business school course in macroeconomics four cohorts of students one before and three after the introduction of the pass requirement have reported their study effort twice during the semester and the relationship between achievement and study effort is investigated by using a within subject within student across study periods approach

terrorism the relevance of the rational choice model terrorism in general and suicidal terrorism in particular is popularly seen as irrational but many economists and political scientists argue otherwise this paper distinguishes three different senses of irrationality unresponsiveness to incentives deviation from narrow self interest and failure of rational expectations it concludes that an intermediate position on the rationality of terrorism is appropriate the typical terrorist sympathizer deviates only slightly from homo economicus but active terrorists arguably stray from narrow self interest and rational expectations and suicidal terrorists probably violate both deterrence remains a viable anti terrorism strategy but deviations from rational expectations increase the potential of persuasion and appeasement

balancing congestion and security in the presence of strategic applicants with private information concerns on security and congestion appear in security screening which is used to identify and deter potential threats e g attackers terrorists smugglers spies among normal applicants wishing to enter an organization location or facility generally in depth screening reduces the risk of being attacked but creates delays that may deter normal applicants and thus decrease the welfare of the approver authority manager screener in this paper we develop a model to determine the optimal screening policy to maximize the reward from admitting normal applicants net of the penalty from admitting bad applicants we use an m m 1 queueing system to capture the impact of security screening policies on system congestion and use game theory to model strategic behavior in which potential applicants with private information can decide whether to apply based on the observed approver s screening policy and the submission behavior of other potential applicants we provide analytical solutions for the optimal non discriminatory screening policy and numerical illustrations for both the discriminatory and non discriminatory policies in addition we discuss more complex scenarios including imperfect screening abandonment behavior of normal applicants and non zero waiting costs of attackers

exploring the dynamics between terrorism and anti terror spending theory and uk evidence abstract recent years have seen governments restricting civic freedoms and legislating significant increases in spending to combat terrorist activities in this paper we investigate the relationship between anti terror spending and terrorism in line with previous findings in the empirical literature on terrorist activity our game theoretic model of the interaction between a benevolent government and a terrorist organization is suggestive of a non linear relation between terrorism and counter terrorism spending using uk data our empirical markov switching implementation provides evidence in favor of this approach the empirical results also show that the probability of transiting into a state with high terror is smaller if defense spending is high

poverty political freedom and the roots of terrorism this article provides an empirical investigation of the determinants of terrorism at the country level in contrast with the previous literature on this subject which focuses on transnational terrorism only i use a new measure of terrorism that encompasses both domestic and transnational terrorism in line with the results of some recent studies this article shows that terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries once the effects of other country specific characteristics such as the level of political freedom are taken into account political freedom is shown to explain terrorism but it does so in a non monotonic way countries in some intermediate range of political freedom are shown to be more prone to terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes this result suggests that as experienced recently in iraq and previously in spain and russia transitions from an authoritarian regime to a democracy may be accompanied by temporary increases in terrorism finally the results suggest that geographic factors are important to sustain terrorist activities this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

human capital and the productivity of suicide bombers the authors empirical analysis suggests that older and more educated suicide bombers are being assigned by their terror organization to more important targets they find that more educated and older suicide bombers are less likely to fail in their mission and are more likely to cause increased casualties when they attack

the hazard rate from unemployment when the search environment is characterised by a decreasing probability of offer abstract when the search environment is stationary the job search model predicts a monotone increasing hazard rate from unemployment we show that when the searcher faces a decreasing probability of offer the hazard may be monotone decreasing or non monotone the implications of these results for data analysis are discussed

religion terrorism and public goods testing the club model abstract can rational models once theological explanations are discredited explain why certain radical religious rebels are so successful in perpetrating suicide attacks the fundamental barrier to success turns out not to be recruiting suicide attackers there is a rational basis for volunteering rather the barrier is the danger of other operatives defecting a club model portraying voluntary religious organizations as efficient providers of local public goods explains how they weed out potential defectors by requiring sacrifices as signals of commitment they are thereby able to succeed in risky terrorist attacks the model has testable implications for tactic choice and damage achieved by clubs and other rebel organizations data spanning a half century on both terrorists and civil war insurgents much from middle east sources and israel palestine reveal that a missions organized by radical religious clubs that provide benign local public goods are both more lethal and are more likely to be suicide attacks than missions organized by other terrorist groups with similar aims and theologies and b suicide attacks are chosen when targets are hard i e difficult to destroy our results suggest benign tactics to counter radical religious terrorism and insurgency

does terrorism work this paper examines whether terrorism is an effective tool for achieving political goals by exploiting geographic variation in terror attacks in israel from 1988 to 2006 we show that local terror attacks cause israelis to be more willing to grant territorial concessions to the palestinians these effects are stronger for demographic groups that are traditionally right wing in their political views however terror attacks beyond a certain threshold cause israelis to adopt a less accommodating position in addition terror induces israelis to vote increasingly for right wing parties as the right wing parties move to the left in response to terror hence terrorism appears to be an effective strategy in terms of shifting the entire political landscape to the left although we do not assess whether it is more effective than non violent means

retaliating against terrorism rational expectations and the optimality of rules versus discretion the application of rational expectations theory to policies of retaliation against terrorism suggests that only unexpected retaliations will be effective in causing terrorist attacks to deviate from their natural rate and that there is a time inconsistency problem in responding to terrorism since the optimal response rate to terrorism would never be believable to the terrorists the first best policy may be for the government retaliating against terrorism to have its response rate constrained by an externally imposed rule a time series intervention model of terrorist attacks against israel supports the natural rate hypothesis and therefore also the desirability of a retaliatory rule over policy discretion israeli retaliation for the 1972 munich massacre was the first israeli retaliation of unexpectedly large magnitude and it produced a temporary deviation of terrorist attacks from the natural rate retaliation has no long term deterrent or escalation effect

assassinations evaluating the effectiveness of an israeli counterterrorism policy using stock market data since the outbreak of the intifada in september 2000 the israeli government has extensively employed a policy of assassinating members of palestinian terrorist organizations theoretically the net effect of an assassination on future terrorism is indeterminate because it embodies two conflicting effects the assassination of a terrorist hurts his organization s capabilities but may increase the motivation for future attacks our indirect empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of assassinations for isreali counterterrorism is based on israeli stock market reactions to news of such operations we rely on the fact that terrorism has had significant adverse effects on the israeli economy and claim that the stock market should react positively to news about effective counterterrorism measures but negatively to news about counterproductive ones we find that the market does not react to assassinations of low ranked members of palestinian terrorist organizations the market does react strongly however to the assassinations of senior leaders of terrorist organizations it declines following assassinations targeting senior political leaders but rises following assassinations of senior military leaders to the extent that these reactions reflect expectations regarding future levels of terrorism they imply that the market perceives the first type of assassinations as counterproductive but the second as an effective measure in combating terrorism

real costs of nominal grade inflation new evidence from student course evaluations college gpas in the united states rose substantially between the 1960 s and the 2000 s over the same period study time declined by almost a half this paper uses a 12 quarter panel of course evaluations from the university of california san diego to discern whether a link between grades and effort investment holds up in a micro setting results indicate that average study time would be about 50 lower in a class in which the average expected grade was an a than in the same course taught by the same instructor in which students expected a c simultaneity suggests estimates are biased toward zero findings do not appear to be driven primarily by the individual student s expected grade but by the average expected grade of others in the class class specific characteristics that generate low expected grades appear to produce higher effort choices evidence that nominal changes in grades may lead to real changes in effort investment

the interplay between preemptive and defensive counterterrorism measures a two stage game a two stage game depiction of counterterrorism is presented emphasizing the interaction between preemptive and defensive measures taken by two commonly targeted countries the preemptor is apt to be the high cost defender with the greater foreign interests a prime target country may also assume the preemptor role the analysis identifies key factors cost comparisons foreign interests targeting risks and domestic terrorism losses that determine counterterrorism allocations market failures associated with preemptive and defensive measures may be jointly ameliorated by a disadvantaged defender nevertheless the subgame perfect equilibrium will still be suboptimal since externalities are not fully internalized

electoral terms and terrorism many terror attacks occur at the beginning of electoral terms we present a game theoretical model with incomplete information to account for this empirical pattern both terrorists and governments can be of weak or strong types we find that the risk of terror attacks is highest at the beginning of electoral terms because striking early allows the terrorists to collect valuable information about the government s type and also because terrorists know that even initially weak governments sometimes retaliate to show toughness closer to an upcoming election the model s predictions are consistent with anecdotal evidence

decentralization fueling the fire or dampening the flames of ethnic conflict and secessionism political decentralization is widely believed to reduce ethnic conflict and secessionism in the world today yet decentralization is more successful in reducing conflict and secessionism in some countries than in others in this article i explore why this difference occurs i demonstrate using a statistical analysis of thirty democracies from 1985 to 2000 that decentralization may decrease ethnic conflict and secessionism directly by bringing the government closer to the people and increasing opportunities to participate in government but that decentralization increases ethnic conflict and secessionism indirectly by encouraging the growth of regional parties regional parties increase ethnic conflict and secessionism by reinforcing ethnic and regional identities producing legislation that favors certain groups over others and mobilizing groups to engage in ethnic conflict and secessionism earlier versions of this article were presented at harvard university and the center for the study of democratic politics at princeton university the author would like to thank sandra alfonso leon james alt micah altman barry friedman shigeo hirano simon hug gary king rose rozaghian tulia falleti and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments

terrorism key assets and critical infrastructures to protect or to rebuild that is the question both the choice between stick and carrot and the tension between control and preservation of civil liberties characterize the policy debate over counterterrorism arguing for the carrot and preservation of civil liberties viewpoint frey and rohner def peace econ 18 3 245 252 2007 propose strategic reconstruction as an alternative to protection our paper provides a comparative analysis of these two policies first we study the rationality of the public s expectations and we show that credible strategic reconstruction may deter terrorist attacks next we derive conditions under which strategic reconstruction is more efficient than protection finally we show that strategic reconstruction may reinforce the efficiency of protection

terror networks and trade does the neighbor hurt abstract this paper studies how network related terrorism redistributes trade flows across countries including those countries that are not a direct source of terror we first develop a game theoretical framework with imperfect information on the spatial location of transnational terrorism to show how the resulting security measures produce a non monotonic effect on the distribution of trade across countries neighbors adjacent to terror even when they do not source it have trade reduced through enhanced security measures while countries farther away benefit from those security measures second to empirically assess the distortional effects of terrorism on trade we first estimate the structural gravity equation derived from our theory then armed with the estimates of the partial effect of neighbor terror on bilateral trade we perform a counterfactual experiment and confirm the non monotonic general equilibrium effect of neighbor terror on trade

the charitable activities of terrorist organizations violent groups sometimes invest significant resources in social work notably in the form of charities and ngos the present paper models a terrorist group s charities as a means to advertise its cause in order to raise popular support the analysis explains how different types of organizations arise in equilibrium depending on government policies then the interaction between a purely terrorist group and an independent local ngo is examined it is shown that a purely terrorist group always invests in more attacks than an integrated terrorist charity organization furthermore the latter may have more ngo activity than a separate local ngo

the roles of foreign aid and education in the war on terror this paper presents a theoretical framework and some empirical results showing that the level of foreign aid received reduces the supply of terrorist attacks by recipient countries as does the recipient country s level of education due account is taken of endogeneity problems in producing these results they suggest that western democracies which are the main targets of terrorist attacks should invest more funds in foreign aid with a special emphasis on supporting education

empirical evidence on the sign of the slope of the hazard rate from unemployment from a fixed effects model empirical evidence on the sign of the slope of the hazard rate from unemployment is obtained from a fixed effects model based on the gamma distribution for unemployment duration the data used are pairs of unemployment spells for adult males in the control and experimental groups of the denver income maintenance experiment the sample selection issue involved in selecting the pair of spells used in the empirical work is discussed the empirical results suggest that for these samples the hazard function is monotone decreasing and support the assumptions that the first two spells of unemployment are identically distributed and can be modelled using the gamma distribution

optimal allocation of resources in airport security profiling vs screening this model examines the role of intelligence gathering and screening in providing airport security we analyze this problem using a game between the government and a terrorist by investing in intelligence gathering the government can improve the precision of its information in contrast screening can be used to search a passenger and thereby deter terrorist attacks we determine the optimal allocation of resources between these two strategies wherein we model the role of intelligence using the concept of supermodular precision one striking result is that under certain circumstances an increase in the investment in intelligence can induce a more devious terrorist to attack with a higher probability we also find that when there is a cost reducing innovation in the screening technology then the optimal investment in intelligence gathering can go either way however such an innovation unambiguously improves social welfare another interesting implication is that a developed economy would value intelligence inputs more than a developing economy we also examine the efficacy of a program such as precheck that allows some select passengers expedited screening in exchange for voluntarily revealing information about themselves our analysis shows that such a program can be used to cushion the adverse effect of budgetary shortages finally we also examine the role of enhanced punishment on the optimal level of intelligence we find that the result can go both ways if the initial level of punishment is high then any further enhancement reduces the optimal level of intelligence gathering however this result is reversed if the initial level of punishment is low

terrorism and the world economy abstract it has been argued that terrorism should not have a large effect on economic activity because terrorist attacks destroy only a small fraction of the stock of capital of a country see e g becker g murphy k 2001 prosperity will rise out of the ashes wall street journal october 29 2001 in contrast empirical estimates of the consequences of terrorism typically suggest large effects on economic outcomes see e g abadie a gardeazabal j 2003 the economic cost of conflict a case study of the basque country american economic review 93 113 132 the main theme of this article is that mobility of productive capital in an open economy may account for much of the difference between the direct and the equilibrium impact of terrorism we use a simple economic model to show that terrorism may have a large impact on the allocation of productive capital across countries even if it represents a small fraction of the overall economic risk the model emphasizes that in addition to increasing uncertainty terrorism reduces the expected return to investment as a result changes in the intensity of terrorism may cause large movements of capital across countries if the world economy is sufficiently open so international investors are able to diversify other types of country risks using a unique data set on terrorism and other country risks we find that in accordance with the predictions of the model higher levels of terrorist risks are associated with lower levels of net foreign direct investment positions even after controlling for other types of country risks on average a standard deviation increase in the terrorist risk is associated with a fall in the net foreign direct investment position of about 5 of gdp the magnitude of the estimated effect is large which suggests that the open economy channel impact of terrorism may be substantial

hiding in plain sight using signals to detect terrorists this paper studies the interaction between a governmental security agency as the transportation security agency or the immigration and naturalization service and a terrorist organization like al qaeda the governmental agency wants to stop the terrorists but first must infer whether a visa applicant or an airline passenger is a terrorist on the basis of some observable signal the terrorist organization s objective is to get past security to commit murder and mayhem we derive the equilibrium strategy for this signaling model and evaluate specific anti terrorist policies as the creation of the new homeland security agency and increased airport security screening

small investment and large returns terrorism media and the economy the study investigates the role of the media in the impact of terrorism on the economy a unique data set of the newspaper articles that reported terrorist attacks during 2002 is used to evaluate their impact on the tel aviv stock exchange an econometric analysis is performed in order to understand how a newspaper decides to cover a terrorist attack i e the number of articles positioning of articles whether to include photos and the size of headlines it was found that media coverage is an important channel through which terrorism produces economic damage the findings also showed that the economic damage caused by terrorist attacks increases monotonically with the amount of media coverage it was also found that the economic impact of the media coverage diminishes over time

collective versus unilateral responses to terrorism global terrorism presents collective action issues for targeted nations proactive measures e g preemptive strikes against terrorists create external benefits for all at risk nations in contrast defensive actions deflect attacks to softer targets thereby giving rise to external benefits to protected foreign residents and external costs to venues abroad coordinated antiterrorism measures are particularly difficult to achieve when many nations must participate and nonparticipants can undo the efforts of others thus freezing terrorists assets or abiding by a no negotiation pledge pose difficult collective action problems these same concerns do not plague decisive action against domestic terrorism

the economics of counterterrorism a survey we provide a review of theoretical and empirical contributions on the economic analysis of terrorism and counterterrorism we argue that simple rational choice models of terrorist behavior in the form of cost benefit models already provide a well founded theoretical framework for the study of terrorism and counterterrorism we also hint at their limitations which relate to the failure of accounting for the dynamics between terrorism and counterterrorism that may produce unintended second order effects as well as for the costs associated with counterterrorism and its international dimension we reevaluate previously proposed counterterrorism strategies accordingly finally in the light of our findings we discuss interesting areas of future research

politics and the suboptimal provision of counterterror i present a model of interactions between voters a government and a terrorist organization the model focuses on a previously unexplored conceptualization of counterterrorism as divided into tactic specific observable and general unobservable tactics when there is divergence between voters and government preferences strategic substitution among different modes of attack by terrorists and agency problems between the voters and government create a situation in which the politically optimal counterterrorism strategy pursued by the government in response to electoral and institutional incentives is quite different from the security maximizing counterterrorism strategy in particular in response to electoral pressure the government allocates resources to observable counterterror in excess of the social optimum this problem is particularly severe when governments put great weight on rent seeking or care less about counterterror than do voters and when terrorists have a large set of tactics from which to choose voters can decrease the magnitude of the agency problem by increasing the benefits of reelection by for example slackening requirements for nonsecurity related public goods i have received valuable comments and advice from bruce bueno de mesquita randy calvert martin cripps james fearon amanda friedenberg robert powell matthew stephenson and barbara walter i thank the weidenbaum center on the economy government and public policy at washington university for financial support

free riding and paid riding in the fight against terrorism overt terrorist acts and the specter of terrorism impose significant costs on the community of civilized nations these costs can be reduced by taking retaliatory action against terrorist organizations and the countries that sponsor them assuming a positive range over which retaliatory cost is less at the marginal than the resulting benefit from reduced terrorism there exists some positive level of retaliation which is efficient from the perspective of the victimized countries an obstacle to achieving the efficient level of retaliation against terrorists results from the fact that much of the benefit from retaliation is general and cannot be captured entirely by the retaliating country a fully efficient policy of retaliation will therefore require a cooperative response from all victimized countries achieving this cooperation however may confront the well known free rider or prisoner s dilemma problem while collectively the targets and potential targets of terrorism are better off retaliating each will likely see its advantage best served by not retaliating in this case it is quite possible that no one will retaliate when the best response is for everyone to retaliate a closer look at the problem of terrorism however suggests that the standard prisoner s dilemma may not be a significant obstacle to retaliation under plausible conditions it will pay one country to retaliate even if other countries choose to free ride indeed given the two options in the standard prisoner s dilemma setting cooperating retaliating or noncooperating nonretaliating it is very likely that all victimized countries will retaliate that no country will take a free ride but this does not mean that the prospects for genuine cooperation in confronting terrorism are good in the case of retaliation against terrorist free riding is only one way a country can increase the net benefit it receives from the public good provided by another it is possible for one country to in effect sell the public good of reduced terrorism that is generated by the retaliation of another country this paidrider possibility has important and obviously adverse implications for the prospects that retaliation will result from a cooperative effort on the part of those countries victimized by terrorists in section i the implication of free riding and paid riding for retaliation against terrorists will be investigated in a two country setting in section ii the circumstances that either encourage or discourage a country from being a paid rider on the retaliation of another country will be considered and some real world examples of paid riding will be discussed

the macroeconomic consequences of terrorism abstract we perform an empirical investigation of the macroeconomic consequences of international terrorism and interactions with alternative forms of collective violence our analysis is based on a rich unbalanced panel data set with annual observations on 177 countries from 1968 to 2000 which brings together information from the penn world table data set the iterate data set for terrorist events and data sets of external and internal conflict we explore these data with cross sectional and panel growth regression analysis and a structural var model we find that on average the incidence of terrorism may have an economically significant negative effect on growth albeit one that is considerably smaller and less persistent than that associated with either external wars or internal conflict as well terrorism is associated with a redirection of economic activity away from investment spending and towards government spending however our investigation also suggests important differences both regarding the incidence and the economic consequences of terrorism among different sets of countries in oecd economies in particular terrorist incidents are considerably more frequent than in other nations but the negative influence of these incidents on growth is smaller

global terrorism deterrence versus pre emption this paper analyses two anti terrorism policies when a targeted nation s people and property are in jeopardy at home and abroad a country s deterrence decision involves both external benefits and costs as the terrorist threat is deflected while its preemption decision typically gives external benefits when the threat is reduced for all potential targets with damages limited to home interests a country will overdeter while for globalized terror a country will underdeter pre emption is usually undersupplied leader follower behaviour is apt to lessen inefficiency for deterrence but worsen inefficiency for pre emption compared with simultaneous choice equilibrium allocations targeted nations can never achieve the proper counterterrorism policy through leadership ce memoire analyse deux politiques anti terrorisme quand la population et la propriete des nations visees sont en danger tant au pays qu a l etranger la decision de dissuasion d un pays entraine des avantages et des couts externes a proportion que la menace terroriste est evitee alors que la decision de preemption produit typiquement des avantages externes quand la menace est reduite pour toutes les cibles potentielles dans le cas de dommages limites aux cibles dans le pays un pays va etre portea sur dissuader alors que dans le cas de terreur globalisee un pays va etre portea sous dissuader la preemption est generalement sous offerte le comportement leader suiveur est susceptible de reduire l inefficacite de la dissuasion mais d empirer l inefficacite de la preemption par rapport a ce qui se passe quand les choix sont simultanes les nations visees ne peuvent jamais en arriver a la politique d anti terrorisme appropriee par la voie du leadership

international terrorism causes consequences and cures a popular view is that international terrorism is on the increase that it is religiously motivated and that it has important adverse consequences this paper investigates this view it examines the empirical evidence on the causes of international terrorism from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and discovers that while religion has had a part to play explanations based on economics and politics appear to be consistent with the facts terrorists come from relatively poor and undemocratic countries and commit attacks in relatively rich and democratic ones the paper then examines the micro macro and global economic effects of international terrorism from both a theoretical and empirical angle and discovers that the negative effect on domestic aggregate demand is temporary and the effect on aggregate supply insignificant finally the paper explores policies to deal with international terrorism and demonstrates that this is complex analogies with conventional crime may be unhelpful

terrorist backlash terrorism mitigation and policy delegation abstract this paper presents a three stage proactive game involving terrorists elected policymakers and voters in each of two targeted countries a representative voter chooses an elected policymaker charged with deciding proactive countermeasures to ameliorate a transnational terrorist threat two primary considerations drive the voters strategic choice free riding on the other countries countermeasures and limiting a reprisal terrorist attack the resulting low proactive countermeasures benefit the terrorists whose attacks successfully exploit voters strategic actions this finding stems from a delegation problem where leadership by voters has a detrimental consequence on the well being of targeted countries domestic politics add another layer of concern when addressing a common terrorist threat

the cycle of violence an empirical analysis of fatalities in the palestinian israeli conflict thomas c schelling s the strategy of conflict 1960 laid the groundwork for thinking about conflicts as non zero sum games in which each side may choose to exercise or threaten violence in order to deter or incapacitate the opponent or simply to exact revenge it has been difficult however to test many of the predictions formulated by schelling and others because of the lack of data on the strategic choices of the two sides engaged in a conflict observed at a high enough frequency for statistical tests to have any power this paper uses daily frequency data to analyze the dynamics of violence during four years of the second intifada the most recent outburst of the palestinian israeli conflict

a simple model of educational standards the author models standards for educational credentials such as high school diplomas standard setters maximize their conception of social welfare knowing that utility maximizing students choose whether to meet the standard the author shows that more egalitarian policymakers set lower standards the median voter would prefer higher standards under symmetric distributions and decentralization lowers standards among identical communities optimal standards do not necessarily fall with increased student preference for leisure deterioration of nonstudent inputs to education or increased student heterogeneity superseding binary credentials by perfect information increases average achievement and social welfare for plausible degrees of heterogeneity egalitarianism and pooling under decentralization