This study examines whether the rally 'round the flag phenomenon is present in the context of terrorist attacks, and investigates the explanations for the related increase of confidence in political institutions and political approval of the incumbent's job performance. I exploit variations in...

In this paper, we investigate the economic consequences of mass shootings. We find that shootings have negative effects on targeted counties' economies. Estimates using three different comparison groups yield similar results. Examining the mechanisms, we find that residents of targeted areas:...

While most civil wars seem to have an economic basis, they are generally pushed by political, ethnic, and religious differences. This paper attempts to identify the drivers of the Syrian civil war of 2011 by investigating the role of ethnic divisions in starting a conflict. We integrate a...

This paper examines the impact of terrorism on voting behavior in the United States. We rely on an exhaustive list of terror attacks over the period 1970-2016 and exploit the inherent randomness of the success or failure of terror attacks to identify the political impacts of terrorism. We first...

We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity's...

We implement a novel empirical strategy for measuring and studying a strong form of nationalism - the willingness to fight and die in a war for national independence - using name choices corresponding to previous war leaders. Based on data on almost half a million soldiers, we first show that...

We study the long-run effects of conflict on social attitudes, with World War II in Central and Eastern Europe as our setting. Much of earlier work has relied on selfreported measures of victimization, which are prone to endogenous misreporting. With our own survey-based measure, we replicate...

Several papers have attempted to estimate and document the impact of conflict on numerous education, health and socioeconomic outcomes. One lesson from this research is the heterogeneity in the effect of violent conflict across and within countries. In this paper we attempt to estimate the...

Recent evidence shows that highly skewed sex ratios at birth are observed not only in China and India, but also for a number of countries in the Southeast Europe and South Caucasus - a region that has seen eruptions of conflicts following the collapse of communist regimes. Yet, the role of...

Nigeria has experienced bouts of violent conflict in different regions over the last few decades leading to significant loss of life. In this paper, we explore the potential short and accumulated long term effects of such conflict on labor supply of agricultural households. Using a nationally...