Earthquakes and Terrorism: The Long Lasting Effect of Seismic Shocks

Marta Reynal-Querol and José García-Montalvo

No 1020, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: The literature on the effect of shocks on civil conflicts has grown rapidly over the last decade. In this paper, we study the relationship between earthquakes and terrorism. Medium intensity earthquakes can produce an inadequate response on the part of the government and generate, or exacerbate, previous grievances perceived by the population of the affected area. Since destruction of infrastructures in these cases would be limited, the state keeps most of its coercive capacity, which reduces the chances of full-fledged conflict but leaves open the possibility of low intensity rebellious acts such as terrorism. We propose a new algorithm to classify terrorism events as domestic or transnational, and we show that the likelihood of a domestic terrorist events increases with the previous occurrence of an earthquake. Using earthquakes as an instrument for income, we also show that development has a positive and significant effect on the likelihood of terrorist events.

Keywords: persistence; local terrorism; earthquakes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H56 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/1020-file.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1020

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().