Individual Well-Being and the Allocation of Time Before and After the Boston Marathon Terrorist Bombing

Andrew Clark and Elena Stancanelli

No 9882, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: There is a small literature on the economic costs of terrorism. We consider the effects of the Boston marathon bombing on Americans' well-being and time allocation. We exploit data from the American Time Use Survey and Well-Being Module in the days around the terrorist attack to implement a regression-discontinuity design. The bombing led to a significant and large drop of about 1.5 points in well-being, on a scale of one to six, for residents of the States close to Boston. The happiness of American women also dropped significantly, by almost a point, regardless of the State of residence. Labor supply and other time use were not significantly affected. We find no well-being effect of the Sandy Hook shootings, suggesting that terrorism is different in nature from other violent deaths.

Keywords: well-being; time use; Terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F52 I31 J21 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap, nep-lma and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - heavily revised version, with Orla Doyle, published in: Economic Journal, 2020, 130 (631), 2065–2104

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9882.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Individual Well-Being and the Allocation of Time Before and After the Boston Marathon Terrorist Bombing (2016)
Working Paper: Individual Well-Being and the Allocation of Time Before and After the Boston Marathon Terrorist Bombing (2016)
Working Paper: Individual Well-Being and the Allocation of Time Before and After the Boston Marathon Terrorist Bombing (2016)
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:iza:izadps:dp9882

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().