The Impact of Terrorism at the Municipality Level in Colombia : A Difference-in-Differences Approach

This paper studies the persistence of the effects that terrorism exert on municipality size. With this aim, we propose to implement new difference-in-differences techniques that control for heterogeneous effects across units and time. Using data of Colombia covering the period 1985-2020, we first show the importance of conditioning on covariates in order to make the parallel trends assumption reliable. In line with previous related studies, our results suggest that terrorist incidents have had transitory adverse effects on municipality size. This findings is robust to the identification strategy adopted