Effects of Neighboring Nation Terrorism on Imports

Abstract

We present a monopolistic competition model to analyze the effects of own nation and neighboring nation terrorism on a nation's imports. The theoretical analysis shows that own nation terrorism may leave relative price of imports unaffected, but neighboring nation terrorism must raise the relative price, reducing imports. We find that a 10% increase in terrorist attacks in a neighboring nation reduces a country's imports from the rest of the world by approximately $320 million USD, on average. Mediation analysis shows that trading delays is a potential channel of transmission of trade costs of terrorism to a neighbor.