Nation Building Through Foreign Intervention: Evidence from Discontinuities in Military Strategies

Melissa Dell and Pablo Querubin

No 22395, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This study uses discontinuities in U.S. strategies employed during the Vietnam War to estimate their causal impacts. It identifies the effects of bombing by exploiting rounding thresholds in an algorithm used to target air strikes. Bombing increased the military and political activities of the communist insurgency, weakened local governance, and reduced non-communist civic engagement. The study also exploits a spatial discontinuity across neighboring military regions, which pursued different counterinsurgency strategies. A strategy emphasizing overwhelming firepower plausibly increased insurgent attacks and worsened attitudes towards the U.S. and South Vietnamese government, relative to a hearts and minds oriented approach.

JEL-codes: F35 F51 F52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ger and nep-sea
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Published as Melissa Dell & Pablo Querubin, 2018. "Nation Building Through Foreign Intervention: Evidence from Discontinuities in Military Strategies*," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 133(2), pages 701-764.

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Journal Article: Nation Building Through Foreign Intervention: Evidence from Discontinuities in Military Strategies (2018)
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