The Economics of Roadside Bombs

Matthew Hanson ()

No 68, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: The U.S. military has been criticized for its failure to stop the Iraqi insurgency’s use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have caused most of the Coalition casualties. We use an instrumental variables approach to estimate the insurgent responses to U.S. military countermeasures. We find that the number of IED attacks (including unobserved attacks) goes up when attacks are made more costly to conduct, suggesting that IED attacks are inferior and may even be a Giffen good. A major benefit of IED countermeasures therefore comes in reducing non-IED attacks. Evaluations of the U.S. military’s $13 billion counter-IED effort have thus significantly understated its success.

Keywords: Iraq War; Instrumental Variables; Substitution Effect; Inferior Goods; Giffen Behavior; Terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 D74 H56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2007-12-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.wm.edu/wp/cwm_wp68.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:cwm:wpaper:68

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Daifeng He ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ) and Alfredo Pereira ().