Search Results
Working Paper
Trade and Terrorism: A Disaggregated Approach
This paper constructs a model of trade consequences of terrorism, where firms in trading nations face different costs arising from domestic and transnational terrorism. Using dyadic dataset in a gravity model, we test terrorism?s effects on overall trade, exports, and imports, while allowing for disaggregation by primary commodities and manufacturing goods. While terrorism has little or no influence on trade of primary products, terrorism reduces trade of manufactured goods. This novel finding pinpoints the avenue by which terrorism harms trade and suggests why previous studies that looked at ...
Working Paper
A Theoretical Treatment of Foreign Fighters and Terrorism
The paper offers a game-theoretical model that includes three participants – the terrorist organization, its foreign fighters, and the adversarial host government. In stage 1, the terrorist group induces foreign fighters to emigrate through wage incentives, while the host government deters these fighters through proactive border security. Foreign fighters decide whether to emigrate from their source country (extensive margin) in stage 2, after which these fighters determine their level of attacks (intensive margin) in stage 3. Comparative statics to the Nash equilibrium are tied to changes ...
Journal Article
The Trade-Offs of Counterterrorism Policies
This article provides a modern overview of counterterrorism tools and their trade-offs for curbing terrorist attacks and their consequences. Defensive and proactive countermeasures constitute two main classes of counterterror tools deployed by targeted governments. The primary drawback of defensive actions, which make terrorist attacks more costly and less apt to succeed, is attack transference that shifts the mode, venue, or target of attacks to those less protected. In contrast, offensive proactive measures, which confront the terrorists directly, may result in backlash as terrorist ...
Working Paper
Effects of Neighboring Nation Terrorism on Imports
We present a monopolistic competition model to analyze the effects of own nation and neighboring nation terrorism on a nation’s imports. The theoretical analysis shows that own nation terrorism may leave relative price of imports unaffected, but neighboring nation terrorism must raise the relative price, reducing imports. We find that a 10% increase in terrorist attacks in a neighboring nation reduces a country’s imports from the rest of the world by approximately $320 million USD, on average. Mediation analysis shows that trading delays is a potential channel of transmission of trade ...
Working Paper
Terror Externalities and Trade: An Empirical Analysis
We report robust evidence of adverse cross-border externalities from terrorism on trade for over 160 countries from 1976 to 2014. Terrorism in one country spills over to reduce trade in neighboring nations. These externalities arise from higher trade costs due to trade delays and macroeconomic uncertainty.
Working Paper
Counterterrorism Policy: Spillovers, Regime Stability, and Corner Solutions
This paper takes a unique approach to the scenario where a resident terrorist group in a (fragile) developing nation poses a terrorism threat at home and abroad. The host developing nation’s proactive countermeasures against the resident terrorist group not only limits terrorism at home and abroad, but also bolsters regime stability at home. A two-stage game is presented in which the developed country takes a leadership role to institute a tax-subsidy combination to discourage (encourage) proactive measures at home (abroad) in stage 1. Stage 2 involves both nations’ counterterrorism ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Financial Sanctions: The Case of Iran 2011-2016
This study provides a detailed analysis of the impact of financial sanctions on publicly traded companies. We consider the effect of imposing and lifting sanctions on the target country's traded equities and examine the differences in the reaction of politically connected firms and those without such connections. The paper focuses on Iran due to (1) its sizable financial markets, (2) imposition of sanctions of varying severity and duration on private and state-owned companies, (3) the significant presence of politically connected firms in the stock market, and (4) the unique event of the 2015 ...
Working Paper
Politically influenced counterterrorism policy and welfare efficiency
The paper examines how two targeted countries strategically deploy their counterterror forces when lobbying defense firms influence counterterror provision. For proactive measures, lobbying activities in a single targeted country lessen underprovision, raise overall counterterrorism, and reduce terrorism. Welfare decreases in the politically influenced country but increases in the other targeted country owing to enhanced free riding. Lobbying influence on the targeted countries’ welfare is tied to terrorists’ targeting preferences and how the lobbied government weighs citizens’ welfare. ...
Working Paper
Mispricing Narratives after Social Unrest
We study how negative sentiment around an industry impacts beliefs and behaviors, focusing on demands for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd and the salience of the “defund the police” movement. We assess stakeholder beliefs on the impact of protests on the stock prices of police-affiliated firms. In our survey experiment, laypeople and finance professionals predicted more negative stock price outcomes when they lacked details on the products supplied by such firms. Exposure to narratives about the context of the protests further reduced the prediction accuracy of these ...