The effect of the war risk: a comparison of the consequences of the two Iraq wars on some financial variables

This paper measures the effect of war on some financial variables using the heteroskedasticity based estimation technique proposed by Rigobon and Sack (2005). The importance of applying this technique is due to the possibility of capturing the effect of a variable, which is here the risk of war, that is not measurable. This work compares the effect of the Iraq war of 1991 with the Iraq war of 2003 on different variables in Italy and US. According to the results, we find that the two wars caused different effects on the analysed variables.