Suspecting an Earthquakes/Terrorism Link

Detective work sometimes involves hazarding guesses about hazards, as this study demonstrates:

“Earthquakes and Terrorism: The Long Lasting Effect of Seismic Shocks,” José G. Montalvo and Marta Reynal-Querol, Journal of Comparative Economics, epub 2019. (Thanks to Manuael ANsede for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at UPF-BarcelonaGSE-IPEG, and UPF-ICREA-BarcelonaGSE-IPEG, Barcelona, Spain, explain:

“In this paper, we study the relationship between earthquakes and terrorism. In the short run, the destruction generated by a medium-range earthquake reduces the opportunity cost of rebelling against the government…. In the medium run the destruction of tangible assets can lead to the closing down of weak firms, the introduction of new technologies, the improvement of productivity and the increase in wealth inequality We propose a new algorithm to… show that the likelihood of a domestic terrorist event increases with the previous occurrence of an earthquake.”