On the Duration and Sustainability of Transnational Terrorist Organizations

This article aims to improve scholars' understanding of how transnational terrorist organizations emerge, survive, thrive, and eventually die. The authors use a data set that catalogues terrorist organizations and their attacks over time (the ITERATE database of thousands of terrorist events from 1968 through 2007) and merge those data with socioeconomic information about the environment in which each attack occurs. They use these data to trace the life cycle pattern of terrorist activity and the organizations that perpetrate them. They identify at least two types of terrorist organizations--- recidivists and one-hit wonders. The authors find that recidivist organizations, those that have repeatedly attacked, are less likely to survive once political and socioeconomic factors have been included. However, they find that sporadic or one-hit wonders are not easily deterred by socioeconomic factors, leaving open a role for counterinsurgency tactics.conflict; terrorism; survival analysis

Military deployments and children's academic achievement: Evidence from Department of Defense Education Activity Schools

Household disruptions - such as divorce, relocation, and parental absence - have long concerned researchers interested in the educational attainment of children. Here, we consider a plausible source of exogenous variation in work-related parental absences--military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2002-2005 period. Combining the standardized test scores of children enrolled in Defense Department schools with their military parent's personnel data, we evaluate the effect of a soldier's deployment on the academic achievement of his or her children. We find that deployments have modest adverse effects in most academic subjects, with lengthy deployments and deployments during the month of testing associated with the largest detrimental effects. Evidence also suggests that these adverse effects may persist for several years.Human capital