ABSTRACT
We study the effect of terrorism on life satisfaction for a sample of 81 countries over the 1994–2009 period. We find that terrorism is robustly associated with less life satisfaction. This effect, however, translates into only modest social costs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The models are estimated with pooled OLS. As also argued by Bjørnskov et al. (Citation2010, 422), a fixed-effects approach is not advisable with a small sample containing many variables (including life satisfaction) that only change very slowly over time. As a robustness check, we report results from a Prais–Winsten regression with panel-corrected SEs. This estimation approach is also used in Bjørnskov, Dreher, and Fischer (Citation2010).
2 As Bjørnskov, Dreher, and Fischer (Citation2007) find that post-communist countries see markedly lower levels of life satisfaction, we report the results for this regional dummy; the results for the other dummies are not shown.
3 The majority of countries in our sample faced comparable or somewhat lower terrorism threats.