Klor, Esteban F., Sebastian Saiegh, and Shanker Satyanath. Working Paper. “
Cronyism in State Violence: Evidence from Labor Repression During Argentina's Last Dictatorship”.
AbstractThis paper studies whether crony governance affects the logic behind governments’ targeting of violence, and how the deployment of violence allows politically connected firms to benefit from crony governance. We address these issues in the context of the Argentine military junta that took power on March 24, 1976. Specifically, we examine the logic driving the choice of firm level union representatives who were subjected to violence following the coup. Using an original dataset assembled and digitized by us, we find that political, business and social connections to the regime are associated with an increase of 2 to 3 times in the number of firm level union representatives arrested and/or disappeared. This is the case even after controlling for a battery of firms’ characteristics that capture alternative explanations for the targeting of violence. The effect is particularly pronounced in privately owned (as opposed to state-owned) firms, suggesting that the correlation is driven by cronyism for financial gain rather than ideology or information transmission. We also show that connected firms benefited from violence against union representatives by subsequently having less strikes and a higher market valuation. Our findings highlight the pervasiveness of ties to the government, even in cases where one of the main stated goals of the regime is to curb cronyism.
Full Text Abrahams, Alexei, et al. Working Paper. “
Mostly Deterred: An Episodic Analysis of The Israel-Gaza Conflict”.
AbstractDoes violent retaliation to attacks by state and non-state actors lead to deterrence or, on the contrary, to counter-retaliation and protracted violence? We study this question in the context of Israel's conflict with Gaza between 2007 and 2014, using original security reports from the United Nations. We build an original dataset including over 16,000 Palestinian projectile launches and over 8,800 Israeli airstrikes, recorded with precise timing. Our findings weigh heavily against the argument that retaliation perpetuates this conflict. The conflict is characterized by short-lived episodes of violence separated by quiet interludes. Episodes tend to last less than one day and are followed by 3.5 days of calm, on average. Most episodes have no retaliation: 61% are one-sided, consisting only of provocations that go unanswered. Among episodes that do, the median number of successive counter-retaliations is only 3. Moreover, counter-retaliation does not induce subsequent episodes: 91% of episodes are initiated by Gazan militants’ attacks and 85% of episodes end with Gazan militants’ attacks. We find that Israeli retaliation strongly correlates with Gazans’ initial number of attacks and type of rockets fired. Yet, rather than provoking an immediate increase in violence or de-escalation, retaliation seems to have no short-term effect, as would be predicted by a model of long-term deterrence.
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