Transcript
ALAN KRUEGER: I am often asked why an economist works on this topic, why did I choose to work on the economics of terrorism, and I have two answers to that question. The first is a little bit flippant, the second less so, but I think they both have some merit. The first is that economics and labor economics in particular which is my field have provided a lot of insight into occupational choice. Some people choose to become lawyers and doctors, some people choose to become terrorists, maybe economics can help to explain that choice. Sometimes people choose to become doctors and then become terrorists.
The second reason is I had done some work in the mid-1990s on economics and hate crimes. Together with a former graduate student from Princeton we studied the occurrence of hate crimes in Germany primarily against Turks. What we found to our surprise was that economic conditions played very little role. We looked at unemployment in an area, wage growth, other measures of economic conditions, and I have to say I was surprised when we first did this work that we found little connection. Then when I dug more into the literature, I discovered that most of the literature on hate crimes finds very little connection.
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