Beyond the Headlines: The intangible costs of terrorism

Harry Pickard, Vincenzo Bove and Georgios Efthyvoulou

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: Do terrorist attacks affect life satisfaction and mental health? To explore this question, we analyse data on all casualty-causing terrorist incidents in Great Britain from 1992 to 2020, and combine this information with individual-level data from the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Survey over the same period. To get as close as possible to a causal interpretation, we exploit variation within individuals, net of potential temporal and attack-specific unobserved factors, and report an array of different specifications and robustness tests. Our analysis reveals that geographic proximity to terrorist attacks decreases life satisfaction, particularly when the incidents occurred within the month before the interview. We also find that individuals with pre-existing mental vulnerabilities exhibit higher distress levels following a recent terrorism shock.

Keywords: wellbeing; life satisfaction; mental health; terrorism; security JEL Classification: I10; I31; H56; D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp734.2024.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:cge:wacage:734

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().