This article investigates the economic effects of conflict, using the terrorist conflict in the Basque Country as a case study. We find that, after the outbreak of terrorism in the late 1960's, per capita GDP in the Basque Country declined about 10 percentage points relative to a synthetic control region without terrorism. In addition, we use the 1998-1999 truce as a natural experiment. We find that stocks of firms with a significant part of their business in the Basque Country showed a positive relative performance when truce became credible, and a negative relative performance at the end of the cease-fire.

It has been argued that terrorism should not have a large effect on economic activity, because terrorist attacks destroy only a small fraction of the stock of capital of a country (see, e.g., Becker and Murphy, 2001). In contrast, empirical estimates of the consequences of terrorism typically suggest large effects on economic outcomes (see, e.g., Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2003). The main theme of this article is that mobility of productive capital in an open economy may account for much of the difference between the direct and the equilibrium impact of terrorism. We use a simple economic model to show that terrorism may have a large impact on the allocation of productive capital across countries, even if it represents a small fraction of the overall economic risk. The model emphasizes that, in addition to increasing uncertainty, terrorism reduces the expected return to investment. As a result, changes in the intensity of terrorism may cause large movements of capital across countries if the world economy is sufficiently open, so international investors are able to diversify other types of country risks. Using a unique dataset on terrorism and other country risks, we find that, in accordance with the predictions of the model, higher levels of terrorist risks are associated with lower levels of net foreign direct investment positions, even after controlling for other types of country risks. A standard deviation increase in the terrorist risk induces a fall in the net foreign direct investment position of about 5 percent of GDP. The magnitude of the estimated effect is large, which suggests that the "open-economy channel" impact of terrorism may be substantial.

Wage decompositions are often used to decompose wage differentials of two demographic groups into differences in characteristics and differences in returns to those characteristics. The latter part is used as an estimate of the degree of discrimination. A problem with this approach is that the contributions of individual dummy variables to the wage decomposition are not identified. This note proposes a simple solution to the identification problem. The solution is illustrated with an empirical application to Spanish labor market data. © 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It has been argued that terrorism should not have a large effect on economic activity, because terrorist attacks destroy only a small fraction of the stock of capital of a country (see, e.g., Becker and Murphy, 2001). In contrast, empirical estimates of the consequences of terrorism typically suggest large effects on economic outcomes (see, e.g., Abadie and Gardeazabal, 2003). The main theme of this article is that mobility of productive capital in an open economy may account for much of the difference between the direct and the equilibrium impact of terrorism. We use a simple economic model to show that terrorism may have a large impact on the allocation of productive capital across countries, even if it represents a small fraction of the overall economic risk. The model emphasizes that, in addition to increasing uncertainty, terrorism reduces the expected return to investment. As a result, changes in the intensity of terrorism may cause large movements of capital across countries if the world economy is sufficiently open, so international investors are able to diversify other types of country risks. Using a unique dataset on terrorism and other country risks, we find that, in accordance with the predictions of the model, higher levels of terrorist risks are associated with lower levels of net foreign direct investment positions, even after controlling for other types of country risks. A standard deviation increase in the terrorist risk induces a fall in the net foreign direct investment position of about 5 percent of GDP. The magnitude of the estimated effect is large, which suggests that the "open-economy channel" impact of terrorism may be substantial.

The literature provides several scalar measures of gender wage discrimination that cannot identify whether discrimination is greater among high earners or among low earners. Furthermore, two populations may exhibit the same value of the scalar measure while discrimination could be very differently distributed. We extend Oaxaca’s scalar measure to any quantile of the distribution of wages. Our measure allows comparisons within a population and inter-population. Using the Spanish Survey of Wage Structure we find that gender wage discrimination increases with the quantile index but as a fraction of the gender wage gap reaches a maximum at the ninth percentile. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2005J16, J31, J7, Gender discrimination, wage gap, quantile regression,