Todd Sandler

The University of Texas at Dallas | UTD · Economics

This paper provides an expanded analysis of NATO security burden sharing by including a variety of conglomerate security terms that involve subsets of military expenditure (ME), UN and non‐UN peacekeeping contributions, global health spending, UN environmental support, and official development assistance. In so doing, we identify components of secu...

Employing two alternative measures of state failure, we investigate how state weakness influences resident terrorist groups’ survival. Theoretically, state failure favors resident terrorist groups’ survival, while state territorial control fosters resident groups’ termination until some control threshold. Empirically, we uncover a robust negative r...

In celebration of the centennial of the birth of Charles M. Tiebout, the current essay establishes the Tiebout hypothesis regarding jurisdictional composition as an origin of club theory and the study of local public goods. The Tiebout hypothesis and club theory constitute two of many foundational contributions to public choice. Tiebout’s voting-wi...

This paper considers the diverse public good characteristics of COVID-19 activities along with their strategic implications. The underlying aggregator technologies, which relate individual contributions to the amount consumed, affect the prognosis for the supply of COVID-related activities. Weakest-link activities assume a particularly pivotal role...

The study of the determinants of African defense demand is of enhanced importance because of unique security challenges, growing defense spending, and changing African Union (AU) integration. From a political geographical vantage, this study presents the first analysis of AU members' demand for defense spending, which accounts not only for members'...

This research note extends the Bara and Hultman (2020 Bara, Corinne, and Lisa Hultman. “Just Different Hats? Comparing UN and Non-UN Peacekeeping.” International Peacekeeping 27, no. 3 (2020): 341–68.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) study on the effectiveness of non-UN peacekeeping missions in terms of curbing one-s...

The article applies the economic theory of alliances to uncover military expenditure burden sharing in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during 1991–2020, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In so doing, our analysis accounts for the relative locations of NATO allies through various spatial or economic weights applie...

A two-stage game investigates how counterterrorism measures affect within-country competition between two rival terrorist groups. Although such competition is commonplace (e.g., al-Nusra Front and Free Syria Army; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army; and al-Fatah and Hamas), there is no theoretical treatment of h...

The paper examines how two targeted countries strategically deploy their counterterror forces when lobbying defense firms influence counterterror provision. For proactive measures, lobbying activities in a single targeted country lessen underprovision, raise overall counterterrorism, and reduce terrorism. Welfare decreases in the lobbied country bu...

This paper quantifies how past transnational terrorist attacks against a potential donor's assets result in enhanced foreign aid flows to a country hosting the responsible terrorist group. Given the reversed causality between foreign aid and terrorism, our empirical analysis puts forward an instrumental variable. Both conflict and governance assist...

Drawing from statements by politicians, the media, policy analysts, and researchers, the current study identifies nine myths associated with terrorism and the practice of counterterrorism. We focus on those myths that have special policy relevance since the four al‐Qaida hijackings on September 11, 2001, and the ensuing heightened security concern....

During recent decades, terrorist groups have sought refuge in weak or failed states from which to launch their attacks. Foreign aid to states harboring those groups may or may not be an effective counterterrorism strategy. The current paper investigates that strategy from resident terrorist groups’ perspectives while accounting for their ideologies...

This paper takes a unique approach to the scenario where a resident terrorist group in a (fragile) developing nation poses a terrorism threat at home and abroad. The host developing nation's proactive countermeasures against the resident terrorist group not only limits terrorism at home and abroad, but also bolsters regime solidity or stability at...

This article introduces the contents of this special issue on terrorist groups. After some general remarks, we review essential concepts germane to the issue’s eight articles. Those concepts include the notion of terrorist groups and their alternative ideologies and goals. Differences between domestic and transnational terrorist attacks are briefly...

This survey investigates the increasing importance of global public goods (GPGs) in today’s interdependent world, driven by ever-growing, cross-border externalities and public good spillovers. Novel technologies, enhanced globalization, and population increases are among the main drivers of the rise of GPGs. Key GPGs include curbing climate change,...

Are terrorist groups with multiple home bases more or less predisposed to direct their violence at home or abroad? Moreover, what are the determinants of home-base terrorist attacks? We address those and related questions using the Extended Data on Terrorist Groups for 1970–2016. In so doing, we find that religious terrorist groups are less incline...

This paper applies survival analysis to ascertain the key empirical determinants of the duration of terrorist hostage-taking incidents during 1978–2018. Our theoretical hypotheses are primarily based on John Cross's bargaining model where negotiation duration depends on initial negotiation spread, bargaining costs, and perceived uncertainty. For ho...

This paper examines the effectiveness of non-UN-led peacekeeping operations (PKOs) from two alternative perspectives. First, the four kinds of regional and international (out of region) PKOs are investigated based on their ability to curtail one-sided violence (OSV) against civilians by host governments or rebels. That analysis is further bolstered...

For 1990–2019, this study presents two-step GMM estimates of EU members’ demands for defense spending based on alternative spatial-weight matrices. In particular, EU spatial connectivity is tied to EU membership status, members’ contiguity, contiguity and power projection, inverse distance, and arms trade. At a Nash equilibrium, our EU demand equat...

This paper introduces transnational terrorist hostage event (TTHE) data set from 1978 to 2018. TTHE includes up to 50 variables for each of its 1,974 incidents, based on information in media sources. Four types of hostage incidents—kidnappings, barricade missions, skyjackings, and non-aerial hijackings—are recorded for a global sample. Select key v...

This paper distinguishes a terrorist group's survivability from its success. Terrorist groups succeed if they join the political process or achieve some of their goals. Based on a sample of 470 terrorist groups, we first estimate the determinants of groups' ending and, conditional on their demise, we identify factors conducive to their success. We...

Past studies of the effectiveness of peacekeeping operations (PKOs) mainly focus on the preservation of peace. If the transitions from peace to conflict or from conflict to peace are correlated based on grievances or war weariness, then a multi‐transition survival analysis provides more efficient estimates and may limit bias. Our main analysis for...

This conceptual article argues that COVID-19 poses myriad global collective action challenges, some of which are easier than others to address. COVID-19 requires numerous distinct activities – e.g., vaccine development, uncovering treatment practices, imposing quarantines, and disease surveillance. The prognosis for effective collective action rest...

During 2002–2018, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) accounted globally for 36.1 per cent of terrorist incidents, 49.3 per cent of terrorist‐induced casualties, and 21.4 per cent of conflict deaths. One focus here is to investigate how MENA's terrorist attacks and conflicts compare with those in the world's other six regions during selected pe...

This paper revisits moral hazard associated with military aid given to host countries to eliminate their resident terrorist groups. This conflict aid presents recipient countries with perverse incentives because the aid ends once resident groups are removed. In the case of US aid recipients, the longevity of resident terrorist groups rose dramatica...

For 2011–2017, this paper revisits NATO burden sharing in light of recent developments and pledges to bolster members’ defense shares of GDP to 2%. Russian nationalism, enhanced transnational terrorism, and intrastate conflicts are apt to increase the publicness of NATO defense spending over the last eight years. When NATO allies’ defense shares of...

This article introduces an extended data set of 760 terrorist groups that engaged in attacks during 1970 to 2016. Unlike most extant group data sets, the extended data on terrorist groups (EDTG) is not tied to terrorist groups and attacks listed in the RAND terrorism data; rather, EDTG is linked to terrorist groups and attacks given in the Global T...

This overview examines critically the post-9/11 empirical literature on terrorism. Major contributions by both economists and political scientists are included. We focus on five main themes: the changing nature of terrorism, the organization of terrorist groups, the effectiveness of counterterrorism policies, modern drivers or causes of terrorism,...

This article investigates the interplay of trade and terrorism externalities under free trade between a developed nation that exports a manufactured good to and imports a primary product from a developing nation. A terrorist organization targets both nations and reduces its attacks in response to a nation’s defensive counterterrorism efforts, while...

This article investigates whether a country’s political proximity to the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom exposes the country to terrorist attacks. We merge information on political proximity between countries and terrorism data to construct a panel of world countries for 1968–2014. Various measures of terrorism are included—i...

What Are the Main Causes of Terrorism? The four waves of terrorism, presented in chapter 1, demonstrate some general causes of terrorism: anarchy, nationalism, leftist ideology, and religious fundamentalism. This list is by no means exhaustive. At times, terrorism may be motivated by issue-specific political...

This article provides an introduction to the special issue on Political violence: affinity, arming, consequences, and perceptions. The issue contains panel analyses, theoretical investigations, and a quantification study. With respect to terrorism, four of the articles study perceptions regarding democratic skepticism, security effectiveness, refug...

We construct a model of the consequences of terrorism on trade, where firms in trading nations face different costs arising from domestic and transnational terrorism. Using a dyadic dataset in a gravity model, we test terrorism’s effects on overall trade, exports, and imports, while allowing for disaggregation by primary commodities and manufacture...

This paper investigates some of the myriad collective action implications of geoengineering. Its two major components – carbon dioxide reduction and albedo modification – present diverse collective action and strategic aspects. Carbon dioxide reduction may be characterized by Prisoners’ Dilemma, threshold, or harmony games, depending on capture and...

This article investigates the demand for military expenditure for a sample of key Asia-Pacific countries. Spatial panel demand estimates are presented for three joined spatial units using a fixed-coefficient spatial lag model based on a two-step efficient GMM estimator. Spatial autoregression estimates are next presented for 1991–2015, founded on a...

This paper presents two-step GMM panel estimates of NATO allies' demand for defense spending during 1968–2015, 1991–2015, and 1999–2015. A novel feature of our NATO estimates is the spatial autoregressive (SAR) weighting of alliance spillovers of defense spending based on ally contiguity (augmented by US defense spending) and inverse distance betwe...

In the standard model of voluntary public good provision and other game theoretic models, climate-friendly leadership of a country is not successful: A unilateral increase of this country’s greenhouse gas abatement measures, i.e., contributions to the global public good of climate protection, will not lead to a positive reaction by the other countr...

Regime type has opposing effects on terrorism. If a regime constrains the executive branch, then terrorism may be more prevalent. If, however, a regime allows all viewpoints to be represented, then grievances may be held in check, resulting in less terrorism. Regimes that value constituents’ lives and property will also act to limit attacks. We for...

This article takes stock of some of the important contributions to the study of peacekeeping (PK). Two key topics stand out: peacekeeping burden sharing and mission effectiveness. For burden sharing, the theoretical foundation is the private provision of public goods and joint products. Implications for burden sharing differ whether financial or tr...

This conceptual paper investigates two paired environmental treaties. At the global level, the effectiveness of the Montreal Protocol on reducing ozone depleters is contrasted with the ineffectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gases (GHGs). Even though curbing ozone shield depletion and reducing GHGs are quintessential global publ...

This chapter employs the concepts of public goods and externalities to investigate myriad aspects of proactive and defensive counterterrorism policies. Such policies include degrading terrorist groups’ assets, hardening potential targets, securing border transit points, gathering intelligence, eliminating safe havens, and infiltrating terrorist gro...

For a standard competitive trade model, the authors show that the incidence of terrorism in different nations can affect the pattern of trade. Nations with a greater incidence of terrorism will export goods that are more immune to terrorism-related disruptions, while importing more terrorism-impacted goods. In addition, terrorism can be welfare aug...

Piracy is an organized crime that is not politically motivated; however, piracy has been linked consistently to the political environment and the quality of national institutions. Provincial governance considerations and spatial aspects may influence the emergence and sustainability of piratical activities. Unlike the extant literature, we investig...

This article sets the stage for this special issue on political violence by providing some necessary background and definitions. For example, data plots are displayed to capture past and recent trends in transnational and domestic terrorist attacks, interstate and intrastate wars, and battle-related deaths. These plots document the changing nature...

Since the publication of Olson’s (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, the exploitation hypothesis, in which the rich shoulder the provision burden of public goods for the poor, has held sway despite empirical exceptions. To address such exceptions, we establish two alternative exploitation hypotheses based on contributors’ asymmetric preferences...

This paper examines the dynamic implications of making concessions to terrorist kidnappers. We apply a Bayesian Poisson changepoint model to kidnapping incidents associated with three cohorts of countries that differ in their frequency of granting concessions. Depending on the cohort of countries during 2001–2013, terrorist negotiation successes en...

The article uses newly available consistent military expenditure data for 1960–2014 to examine past and current global spending trends during and after the Cold War. We are particularly interested in the impact of the end of the Cold War, 9/11 and the 2008 recession on military spending worldwide. The global share of military spending of East Asia...

This game-theoretic paper distills various strategic aspects of difficult-to-handle global challenges, such as climate change, disease eradication, financial crises, nuclear weapon proliferation, trade boycotts, species preservation, and transnational terrorism. The analysis focuses on issues that involve shoring up weakest links, coordinating acti...

This article investigates whether gender imbalance may be conducive to domestic terrorism in developing countries. A female-dominated society may not provide sufficient administration, law, or order to limit domestic terrorism, especially since societies in developing countries primarily turn to males for administration, policing, and paramilitary...

Based on spatial panel regressions for 1990-2012, this article draws publicness differences between peacekeeping personnel contributions to UN and non-UN peacekeeping operations. The analysis shows that UN missions are much less responsive to personnel spillovers, derived from other contributors’ peacekeepers, than is the case of non-UN missions. U...

This paper investigates the role that International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) surveillance—the Mobile INTERPOL Network Database (MIND) and the Fixed INTERPOL Network Database (FIND—played in the War on Terror since its inception in 2005. MIND/FIND surveillance allows countries to screen people and documents systematically at border cr...

This paper presents a retrospective view of Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action. The paper’s primary purpose is to investigate the validity of Olson’s propositions concerning group size, group composition, and institutional design. This purpose is accomplished by drawing on the literature and the paper’s game-theoretic representations. Ke...

This introduction sets the stage for the articles collected in this special issue of Oxford Economic Papers. It begins by introducing essential concepts including domestic terrorism, transnational terrorism, defensive actions, proactive countermeasures, and guerrilla warfare. Three terrorist event databases, used by seven of the articles, are brief...

This paper is the first global investigation of the relationship between remittances and terrorism. To discern this relationship, we draw terrorism event data from the Global Terrorism Database and International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorism Events. When a host of standard terrorism controls is employed, lagged remittances as a share of gross...

This paper implements discrete-time survival models to ascertain the determinants behind specific endings for terrorist groups during 1970–2007. Based on multinomial logit regressions, we estimate the hazard probabilities associated with three endings for terrorist groups: splintering from internal factors, being defeated by force, and joining the...

This article reinvestigates the relationship between real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and terrorism. We devise a terrorism Lorenz curve to show that domestic and transnational terrorist attacks are each more concentrated in middle-income countries, thereby suggesting a nonlinear income–terrorism relationship. Moreover, this point of con...

This article investigates inconsistency and invalid statistical inference that often characterize dynamic panel analysis in international political economy. These econometric concerns are tied to Nickell bias and cross-sectional dependence. First, we discuss how to avoid Nickell bias in dynamic panels. Second, we put forward factor-augmented dynami...

This paper provides the first venue-based empirical investigation of the number and lethality of suicide terrorist attacks on a global scale. For 1998-2010, we assemble a data set of 2448 suicide terrorist incidents, drawn from the three main terrorist event databases, i.e., International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events (ITERATE), the Glo...