Calculating Tragedy: Assessing the Costs of Terrorism

Bruno Frey, Simon Luechinger and Alois Stutzer

No 205, IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: The trends and consequences of terrorist activities are often captured by counting the number of incidents and casualties. More recently, the effects of terrorist acts on various aspects of the economy have been analyzed. These costs are surveyed and put in perspective. As economic consequences are only a part of the overall costs of terrorism, possible approaches for estimating the utility losses of the people affected are discussed. Results using the life satisfaction approach, in which individual utility is approximated by self-reported subjective well-being, suggest that people�s utility losses may far exceed the purely economic consequences.

Keywords: Terrorism; subjective well-being; life satisfaction; utility loss (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 H56 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-edu and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (175)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/52100/1/iewwp205.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: CALCULATING TRAGEDY: ASSESSING THE COSTS OF TERRORISM (2007)
Working Paper: Calculating Tragedy: Assessing the Costs of Terrorism (2004)
Working Paper: Calculating Tragedy: Assessing the Costs of Terrorism (2004)
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:zur:iewwpx:205

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IEW - Working Papers from Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Severin Oswald ().