Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
恐怖主义与利他捐赠：来自儿童赞助的证据
Terrorism and Altruistic Giving: Evidence from Child Sponsorship
摘要
We study how terrorist attacks targeting educational institutions affect private development aid through child sponsorship. Conceptually, terrorist events may increase sponsorship by signaling greater need or reduce it if affected communities are seen as less effective destinations to support. We combine global administrative data from Plan International on child sponsorship across 50 countries over the 2008-2018 period, aggregated at the Primary Sampling Unit (PSU) level, with geocoded terrorism events from the Global Terrorism Database. Our core specification focuses on attacks against educational institutions within 20 km of each PSU. We estimate the causal effect using a heterogeneity-robust difference-in-differences approach suited to staggered, non-absorbing treatments. We find that attacks on educational institutions reduce the share of sponsored children by about 3 percentage points, a 4 percent decline relative to the mean. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest this corresponds to funding losses of approximately US$615,000 across affected communities over the study period. Since sponsorship is geographically targeted, these losses fall on the specific communities, underscoring the need to buffer local development funding against security shocks.
中文摘要
我们研究针对教育机构的恐怖袭击如何通过儿童赞助影响私人发展援助。从概念上讲，恐怖事件可能通过释放更大需求的信号而增加赞助，或者如果受影响社区被视为支持效果较差的目的地，则可能减少赞助。我们将Plan International提供的2008—2018年期间覆盖50个国家、按初级抽样单元（PSU）层面汇总的儿童赞助全球行政数据，与全球恐怖主义数据库中经过地理编码的恐怖主义事件相结合。我们的核心设定聚焦于每个PSU方圆20公里内针对教育机构的袭击。我们使用适用于交错、非吸收处理的异质性稳健双重差分方法估计因果效应。我们发现，对教育机构的袭击使受赞助儿童占比下降约3个百分点，相对于均值下降4%。粗略估算表明，这相当于研究期间受影响社区约615,000美元的资助损失。由于赞助在地理上具有针对性，这些损失落在特定社区身上，凸显出有必要缓冲地方发展资金以应对安全冲击。