Research

Esteban F. Klor, Asaf Zussman. Working Paper. “Long Term Effects of Political Violence on Attitudes: Evidence from the Second Intifada”.Abstract

This paper studies the long-term effects of politically motivated violence on individuals’ political attitudes focusing on the Second Intifada (2000 – 2005). We conduct a large-scale survey that measures Israelis’ attitudes today and elicits their places of residence since 1985. The survey allows us to measure individuals’ direct exposure to terrorism and to account for potential selective migration. This, in combination with the fact that individuals’ characteristics are balanced with respect to their exposure to terrorism, enables us to overcome identification concerns and provide credible estimates of the causal effects of the Intifada on attitudes. The results indicate that exposure to terrorism during the Second Intifada caused a persistent and substantial shift toward right-wing attitudes that is still observable two decades later. Thus, our analysis provides systematic empirical evidence supporting the view that the Second Intifada soured a generation of Israelis on the idea of peace.

Abrahams, Alexei, et al. Working Paper. “Mostly Deterred: An Episodic Analysis of The Israel-Gaza Conflict”.Abstract

This paper assesses the validity of narrow deterrence theory between a State and a Non-State actor in the context of the Israel and Gaza conflict.  We build the most comprehensive data set on this conflict between 2007 and 2014 using original security reports from the United Nations, which capture over 16,000 Palestinian projectile launches and over 8,800 Israeli airstrikes, recorded with precise timing. We show that this 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 and consist only of provocations that go unanswered. Moreover, counter-retaliation does not induce subsequent episodes. 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. These findings support the concept of narrow deterrence and weigh heavily against the argument that retaliation perpetuates this conflict.

Freedman, Michael, and Esteban F. Klor. 2023. “When Deterrence Backfires: House Demolitions, Palestinian Radicalization, and Israeli Fatalities”. Journal of Conflict Resolution 67 (7) : 1592-1617.Abstract

Conflict points around the world involve government forces fighting terrorist groups. In this type of warfare, there is a danger that counterterrorist efforts may backfire, providing ammunition for additional cycles of violence. We study this issue focusing on selective and indiscriminate house demolitions employed by Israel during the Second Intifada. We exploit the temporal and spatial variation of this policy to assess its impact on Palestinians’ political views. We find that the civilian population does not react to punitive house demolitions, a selective form of counterterrorism. On the contrary, Palestinians are more likely to adopt more radical political opinions in response to precautionary house demolitions, an indiscriminate form of counterterrorism. We also show that political radicalization induced by indiscriminate counterterrorism leads to an increase in future terror attacks. Overall, our analysis provides explicit empirical support to the mechanism behind the positive correlation between indiscriminate counterterrorism and future levels of violence.

Klor, Esteban F., Sebastian Saiegh, and Shanker Satyanath. 2021. “Cronyism in State Violence: Evidence from Labor Repression During Argentina's Last Dictatorship”. Journal of the European Economic Association 19 (3) : 1439-1487.Abstract

This 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.

Benmelech, Efraim, and Esteban F. Klor. 2020. “What Explains the Flow of Foreign Fighters to ISIS?”. Terrorism and Political Violence 32 (7) : 1458-1481.Abstract

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of the link between economic, political, and social conditions and the global phenomenon of ISIS foreign fighters. We find that poor economic conditions do not drive participation in ISIS. In contrast, the number of ISIS foreign fighters is positively correlated with a country's GDP per capita and Human Development Index (HDI). In fact, many foreign fighters originate from countries with high levels of economic development, low income inequality, and highly developed political institutions. Other factors that explain the number of ISIS foreign fighters are the size of a country's Muslim population and its ethnic homogeneity. Although we cannot directly determine why people join ISIS, our results suggest that the flow of foreign fighters to ISIS is driven not by economic or political conditions but rather by ideology and the difficulty of assimilation into homogeneous Western countries. These conclusions are consistent with those of the related qualitative literature that relies on the personal profiles of a small and selected sample of ISIS foreign fighters.

Gould, Eric D., and Esteban F. Klor. 2019. “Party Hacks and True Believers: The Effect of Party Affiliation on Political Preferences”. Journal of Comparative Economics 47 ( 3) : 504-524.Abstract

This paper examines the effect of party affiliation on an individual’s political views.  To do this, we exploit the party realignment that occurred in the U.S. due to abortion becoming a more prominent and highly partisan issue over time.  We show that abortion was not a highly partisan issue in 1982, but a person’s abortion views in 1982 led many to switch parties over time as the two main parties diverged in their stances on this issue.  We find that voting for a given political party in 1996, due to the individual’s initial views on abortion in 1982, has a substantial effect on a person’s political, social, and economic attitudes in 1997.  These findings are stronger for highly partisan political issues, and are robust to controlling for a host of personal views and characteristics in 1982 and 1997.  As individuals realigned their party affiliation in accordance with their initial abortion views, their other political views followed suit.

Klor, Esteban F., and Eyal Winter. 2018. “On Public Opinion Polls and Voters' Turnout”. Journal of Public Economic Theory 20 (2) : 239-256.Abstract
This paper studies the effects that the revelation of information on the electorate's preferences has on voters' turnout. The experimental data show that closeness in the division of preferences induces a significant increase in turnout. Moreover, for closely divided electorates (and only for these electorates) the provision of information significantly raises the participation of subjects supporting the slightly larger team relative to the smaller team. We show that the heterogeneous effect of information on the participation of subjects in different teams is driven by the subjects' (incorrect) beliefs of casting a pivotal vote. Simply put, subjects overestimate the probability of casting a pivotal vote when they belong to the team with a slight majority, and choose the strategy that maximizes their utility based on their inflated probability assessment. Empirical evidence on gubernatorial elections in the U.S. between 1990 and 2005 is consistent with our main experimental result. Namely, we observe that the difference in the actual vote tally between the party leading according to the polls and the other party is larger than the one predicted by the polls only in closely divided electorates. We provide a behavioral model that explains the main findings of our experimental and empirical analyses.
Ben-Bassat, Avi, Momi Dahan, and Esteban F Klor. 2016. “Is Centralization a Solution to the Soft Budget Constraint Problem?”. European Journal of Political Economy 45 (1) : 57-75.Abstract

This paper focuses on the centralization program implemented in Israel in 2004 to analyze whether the administrative subordination of municipalities is an effective policy to deal with problems related to soft-budget constraint of lower level governments.  The results consistently show, for different specifications and samples of municipalities, that this program brought a substantial decrease of municipalities’ expenditures (mostly because of decreases on salary payments), and an increase of local property tax collection.  Our analysis shows that all of the fiscal impact of the program is due to the appointment of an accountant that reports directly to the central government, a relatively mild form of administrative subordination.  In contrast, more intrusive forms of subordination, like the central imposition of a recovery program, do not result in any substantial improvement of municipalities’ fiscal situation.  This leads us to conclude that a mild form of administrative subordination is an effective tool to cope with problems related to soft-budget constraints, whereas political subordination is not an effective tool to reach that goal.

Gould, Eric D, and Esteban F Klor. 2016. “The Long-Run Effect of 9/11: Terrorism, Backlash, and the Assimilation of Muslim Immigrants in the West”. Economic Journal 126 (597) : 2064-2114.Abstract

This paper investigates whether the 9/11 attacks affected the assimilation rate of Muslims in the United States.  Terror attacks by Islamic groups are likely to induce a backlash against Muslims, thereby raising their costs of assimilation. We find that Muslim immigrants living in states with the sharpest increase in hate crimes also exhibit: (i) greater chances of marrying within their own ethnic group; (ii) higher fertility; (iii) lower female labour force participation; and (iv) lower English proficiency. These findings shed light on the increasing use of terror and concurrent rise in social tensions surrounding Muslim immigrants in the West.

Benmelech, Efraim, Claude Berrebi, and Esteban F. Klor. 2015. “Counter-Suicide-Terrorism: Evidence from House Demolitions”. Journal of Politics 77 (1) : 27-43.Abstract

This paper examines whether house demolitions are an effective counterterrorism tactic against suicide terrorism. We link original longitudinal micro-level data on houses demolished by the Israeli Defense Forces with data on the universe of suicide attacks against Israeli targets. By exploiting spatial and time variation in house demolitions and suicide attacks during the second Palestinian uprising, we show that punitive house demolitions (those targeting Palestinian suicide terrorists and terror operatives) cause an immediate, significant decrease in the number of suicide attacks. In contrast, Palestinian fatalities do not have a consistent effect on suicide terror attacks, while curfews and precautionary house demolitions (demolitions justified by the location of the house but unrelated to the identity of the house's owner) cause a significant increase in the number of suicide attacks. The results support the view that selective violence is an effective tool to combat terrorist groups and that indiscriminate violence backfires.

Jaeger, David, et al. 2015. “Can Militants use Violence to Win Public Support? Evidence from the Second Intifada”. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59 (3) : 528-549.Abstract

This paper investigates whether attacks against Israeli targets help Palestinian factions gain public support.  We link individual level survey data to the full list of Israeli and Palestinian fatalities during the period of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), and estimate a flexible discrete choice model for faction supported.  We find some support for the “outbidding” hypothesis, the notion that Palestinian factions use violence to gain prestige and influence public opinion within the community.  In particular, the two leading Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, gain in popularity following successful attacks against Israeli targets.  Our results suggest, however, that most movement occurs within either the secular groups or within the Islamist groups, but not between them.  That is, Fatah’s gains come at the expense of smaller secular factions while Hamas’ gains come at the expense of smaller Islamic factions and the disaffected.  In contrast, attacks by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad lower support for that faction.

Ben-Bassat, Avi, Momi Dahan, and Esteban F Klor. 2015. “Does Campaign Spending Affect Electoral Outcomes?”. Electoral Studies 40 (1) : 102-114.Abstract

This study investigates the effect of candidates’ expenditure on elections’ results focusing on run-off elections’ data. Our analysis, based on all run-off municipal elections in Israel between 1993 and 2008, shows that candidates’ share of the vote is not substantially affected by their campaign spending. This outcome contradicts recent results showing that, in a developing country where voting is compulsory, campaign expenditures have a significant effect on vote shares. Yet, it is in line with the evidence of earlier studies based on developed countries showing that the effect of campaign spending is limited. This leads us to suggest that campaign spending may be effective in developing countries with consolidating democracies because compulsory voting forces the relative poor population to turn out and vote, and this population is relatively more impressionable by campaign spending on media advertisements. 

Klor, Esteban F, et al. 2014. “Can Higher Bonuses Lead to Less Effort? Incentive Reversal in Teams”. Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization 97 (1) : 72-83.Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that a global increase in monetary rewards should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive reversal might occur, i.e., an increase in monetary rewards (either because bonuses increase or effort costs decrease) may induce agents that are fully rational, self-centered money maximizers to exert lower effort in the completion of a joint task. Incentive reversal happens when increasing one agent’s individual rewards alters her best-response function and, as a result, removes other agents’ incentives to exert effort as their contributions are no longer required to incentivize the first agent. Herein we discuss this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon and report on two experiments that provide supportive evidence.

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