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| 1 |
ID:
173768
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| Summary/Abstract |
By facilitating the flow of information in society, communications technology (CT; e.g., newspapers, radio, television, the Internet) can help terrorists to (i) spread their message, (ii) recruit followers, and (iii) coordinate among group members. However, CT also facilitates monitoring and arresting terrorists. This article formulates the hypothesis that a society’s level of CT is systematically related to terrorism. We introduce a simple theoretical framework, suggesting that terrorism first becomes more attractive with a rise in CT, but then decreases, following an inverted U shape. Accessing data for 199 countries from 1970 to 2014, we find evidence consistent with these predictions: terrorism peaks at intermediate ranges of CT and corresponding magnitudes are sizable. Our estimations control for a range of potentially confounding factors, as well as country fixed effects and year fixed effects. Results are robust to a battery of alternative specifications and placebo regressions. We find no evidence of a potential reporting bias explaining our findings.
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| 2 |
ID:
169911
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper provides empirical evidence that suicide attacks systematically draw more media attention than non-suicide terrorist attacks. Analyzing 60,341 terrorist attack days in 189 countries from 1970 to 2012, I introduce a methodology to proxy for the media coverage each one of these attack days receives in the New York Times. Suicide attacks are associated with significantly more coverage. In the most complete regression, one suicide attack produces an additional 0.6 articles—a magnitude equivalent to the effect of 95 terrorism casualties. This link remains robust to including a comprehensive list of potentially confounding factors, fixed effects, and country-specific time trends. The effect is reproduced for alternative print and television outlets (BBC, Reuters, CNN, NBC, CBS), but remains weak for Google Trends (worldwide and in the U.S.), a more direct proxy for people’s interests, and is non-existent for C-SPAN, a television station dedicated to broadcasting political discussions directly. Thus, the media appears to cover suicide missions in an extraordinary fashion, which may in turn explain their prominence among terrorist organizations.
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| 3 |
ID:
169294
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article introduces a simple game-theoretic model to explain how policymakers' decisions may result in underinvestment in the global space sector. Because of international spillovers, policymakers can arrive at a globally suboptimal Nash equilibrium. We then show that policymakers may achieve optimal outcomes by focussing on international, rather than domestic space projects. Next, we introduce time dynamics to enhance the model's realism and show that improving quantitative cost-benefit analysis methods may further remedy underinvestment, as policymakers can overcome the influence of international spillovers and reach the optimal outcome by assigning higher values to future payoffs. However, when we modify the traditional iterated prisoner's dilemma to more accurately represent space sector funding dynamics, we find further evidence for a propensity to underinvest. As such, we show that the dynamic game solution is imperfect: democratic policymakers are inherently constrained by electoral cycles and future payoffs from space programs that tend to be difficult to predict, especially when compared to more traditional public policy programs. We recommend that governments should support private companies in the space sector to benefit from the comparative advantages they offer.
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