Mark Harrison
Mark Harrison is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics, University of Warwick; Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University; and Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. He obtained a BA in Economics & Politics from Cambridge in 1970 and a DPhil from Oxford in 1974. He has written or edited a number of books including The Economics of World War I (with Stephen Broadberry, 2005), The Soviet Defence Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev (with John Barber, 2000), and The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (1998). His papers are published in journals including Comparative Economic Studies, the Economic History Review, the Journal of Comparative Economics, the Journal of Economic History, and the Journal of Economic Literature.
Papers Published in World Economics:
Reply to Aldo Matteucci, ‘Is Suicide Terrorism a Novel Economic Phenomenon?’
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An Economist Looks at Suicide Terrorism
Suicide terrorism has an economic aspect. The organisation of a suicide mission requires an incentive, a voluntary transaction, and a contract that is enforceable by the parties to it. A terrorist faction that competes for power in a community that is both oppressed and oppressive provides young people with an incentive to invest in an identity that is rendered more valuable by death. Suicide attacks are then the outcome of a voluntary agreement between the faction and the young person to trade life for identity. The institution of the “living martyr” renders the agreement privately enforceable. Thus, suicide terrorism is the outcome of an individual rational choice. There are some implications for counter-measures.
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