Mattingly (2024) investigates how authoritarian leaders select military generals, focusing on the People's Liberation Army of China. Three main findings emerge. First, in general, Chinese leaders consider both personal ties (as a proxy for loyalty to the leader) and combat experience (as a proxy...

Rigorous replication efforts is crucial for good social science, and I am grateful to Jetter and Swasito (2024), who replicate and extend the results of a recent published paper (Mattingly, 2024). My original paper examined, among other things, the ways in which periods of foreign and domestic...

This paper systematically analyzes media attention devoted to terrorist attacks worldwide between 1998 and 2012. Several aspects are related to predicting media attention. First, suicide missions receive significantly more coverage, which could explain their increased popularity among terrorist...

This paper presents an empirical test for the hypothesis that US news coverage of al-Qaeda causes al-Qaeda attacks. To isolate causality, disaster deaths worldwide provide an instrumental variable crowding out al-Qaeda coverage. Studying daily al-Qaeda coverage by CNN, NBC, CBS, and Fox News, as...

Can media coverage of a terrorist organization encourage their execution of further attacks? This paper analyzes the day-to-day news coverage of Al-Qaeda on US television since 9/11 and the group's terrorist strikes. To isolate causality, I use disaster deaths worldwide as an exogenous variation...

Is humanity's circle of moral concern expanding, as often claimed? I explore frequencies of morally universal language in 15m book publications in American English, British English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian from 1800-2000. In each language, morally universal terminology diminished...

There exists a persistent disagreement in the literature over the effect of business cycles on economic growth. This paper offers a solution to this disagreement, suggesting that volatility carries a positive direct effect, but also a negative indirect effect, operating through the insurance...

This paper introduces a unifying theoretical framework to understand the relationship between different types of communications technology (CT) and the incidence of civil conflict. In our model, one-way CT allows the government to broadcast messages they use to (mis)inform dissidents about the...

We analyze whether landlocked regions are systematically poorer, using panel data for 1,527 regions in 83 nations from 1950-2014 and exploiting within-country-time variation. Lacking ocean access decreases regional GDP/capita by ≈13%. Specifically, coastal distance matters but not the length...

In the early 2000s, the Colombian government aired messages during games of the national football team, urging FARC rebels to demobilize. We first study the strategy's effectiveness, leveraging game dates, kick-off times, and spatial-temporal variation in rain-induced signal strength in a...