Economic Conditions and the Quality of Suicide Terrorism

We are grateful to Eric Gould, Michael Intriligator and Todd Sandler for very helpful suggestions. We have also benefited from comments from participants in the Workshop on Political Economy of Counter-Insurgency at Princeton University, the Conference on Conflict and Cooperation at Northwestern University, the 2009 meetings of the American Economic Association, the NBER meeting on the Economics of National Security and the meeting of the Network for the Economic Analysis of Terrorism and Anti-Terrorism Policies. We thank the Israeli Security Agency for providing us with their data on suicide terrorists, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics for the data from the Labor Force Survey. Berrebi thanks the RAND Initiated Research Fund for its financial support and the RAND National Security Research Division who made this project possible. Benmelech thanks the Warburg Fund at Harvard University for financial support. Berrebi and Klor are grateful for the support from the "New Agenda for European Security Economics (EUSECON)" project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme. Klor thanks the warm hospitality of Boston University and the National Bureau of Economic Research while he was working on this project. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.