Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq

We acknowledge the comments of seminar participants at the Western Economic Association, the NBER Economics of National Security group, National Defense University, Princeton, Stanford, UC San Diego, the University of Michigan, USAID, Yale, and the World Bank. Colonel Michael Meese and the Department of Social Sciences, US Military Academy provided critical support throughout the duration of this project. Colonel Jim Glackin at the Gulf Region Division of the Army Corps of Engineers and COL Michael Hendricks and Joseph Harrison of the US Military Academy Department of Geography provided invaluable assistance in compiling and processing data. Tiffany Chou, Luke Nayef Condra, and Liang Choon Wang provided expert research assistance. Two anonymous reviewers, Nageeb Ali, LTC Patrick Buckley, LTC Lee Ewing, and James Fearon provided critical comments. We acknowledge grant #2007-ST-061-000001 by the United States Department of Homeland Security through the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events and by U.S. Department of Defense's Minerva Initiative (AFOSR Grant FA9550-09-1-0314). Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations in this document are those of the authors and do not reflect views of the United States Department of Homeland Security or United States Department of Defense. All mistakes are ours. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• December 23, 2008
• December 29, 2009