What motivates kidnapping decisions by rebel groups? This paper studies news coverage of a proposed prisoner exchange program (the Acuerdo Humanitario; AH) in connection with FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) kidnappings in the early 2000s. We propose that AH News nourished the...

Since formal rules can only partially reduce opportunistic behavior, third-party sanctioning to promote fairness is critical to achieving desirable social outcomes. Social norms may underpin such behavior, but they can also undermine it. We study one such norm the "don't be a toad" norm, as it...

All too frequently, governments kill social movement leaders in an attempt to halt challenges to state power. Sometimes, such repression yields its intended effect; other times, it produces a powerful backlash, strengthening mass commitment and bolstering protest. In this article, we propose...

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...

Offshoring is usually thought of in the context of globalization and economic activity. Yet a signal feature of the Bush Administration's quot;war on terrorquot; was the offshoring of core security functions. The most famous example is the use of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center, but many...

This paper seeks to examine if there is a causal link between terrorist incidents and foreign direct investment in the cases of Colombia and Peru, using large-scale and up-to-date data. The data of both parameters from the early 1970s to 2020 are involved in the analysis. The statistical...

We analyze the differences in the socioeconomic profiles between suicide terrorists and ‘regular’ militants using a dataset of 1596 militants (including 209 suicide terrorists) from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). We find that suicide terrorists are better educated, younger, less...

The relevance of political risk to international trade and investment remains a topic of continuing interest. However, summary measures of political risk, including country corruption, do not give consistent results. In this paper, we bring together two recent streams of literature to highlight...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces the number of transnational terror events in a country, while...

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...