Daniel Auer publishes in top Political Science and Economics Journals

We are proud to announce that our Assistant Professor Daniel Auer has recently published major research papers in two prestigious journals:

The article “Bribes and Bombs: The Effect of Corruption on Terrorism” (with Daniel Meierrieks) recently appeared on the American Political Science Review.

In this article, the authors leverage plausibly exogenous variation in regional exposure to corruption to provide causal estimates of the impact of local political corruption on terrorist activity for a sample of 175 countries between 1970 and 2018. They find that higher levels of corruption lead to more terrorism. This result is robust to a variety of empirical modifications, including various ways in which we probe the validity of our instrumental variables approach. They also show that corruption adversely affects the provision of public goods and undermines counter-terrorism capacity. These empirical findings are consistent with predictions from a game-theoretical representation of terrorism, according to which corruption makes terrorism relatively more attractive compared to peaceful contestation, while also decreasing the costs of organizing and carrying out terrorist attacks.

The article “Communication Barriers and Infant Health: The Intergenerational Effect of Randomly Allocating Refugees across Language Regions” (with Johannes S. Kunz) is forthcoming in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.

This paper investigates the intergenerational effect of communication barriers on child health at birth. The authors study refugees in Switzerland who come from French- or Italian-speaking countries and who, upon arrival, are randomly allocated to different cantons, in which either German, French, or Italian is the dominant language. Children born to mothers who were exogenously allocated to a region whose dominant language matched their origin language are, on average, 72 grams (or 2.2%) heavier. Further analyses suggest that this effect is likely driven by information about health-related behavior and services. Co-ethnic networks, however, can partly compensate for communication barriers.

The publications offer significant contributions to understanding the role of institutions and their impact on society and to the causal quantification of the returns to language skills.

We congratulate Daniel Auer on this outstanding achievement and look forward to seeing the impact of this work on the academic community.

See Auer’s profile on the CCA website.