TY - JOUR AU - Berman,Eli AU - Callen,Michael AU - Felter,Joseph H. AU - Shapiro,Jacob N. TI - Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Iraq and the Philippines JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15547 PY - 2009 Y2 - November 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15547 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15547.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Eli Berman Department of Economics, 508 University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093 Tel: 858/534-2858 Fax: 858/534-7040 E-Mail: elib@ucsd.edu Michael J. Callen Department of Economics, 508 University of California San Diego 9500 Gilman Dr. La Jolla, CA 92093 E-Mail: mjcallen@ucsd.edu Joseph Felter Hoover Institution 434 Galvez Mall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-6010 E-Mail: felter@hoover.stanford.edu Jacob N. Shapiro Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs Princeton University Robertson Hall Princeton, NJ 08544-1013 Tel: 608-258-2256 Fax: 609-258-0482 E-Mail: jns@princeton.edu AB - Most aid spending by governments seeking to rebuild social and political order is based on an opportunity-cost theory of distracting potential recruits. The logic is that gainfully employed young men are less likely to participate in political violence, implying a positive correlation between unemployment and violence in locations with active insurgencies. We test that prediction in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Philippines, using survey data on unemployment and two newly-available measures of insurgency: (1) attacks against government and allied forces; and (2) violence that kills civilians. Contrary to the opportunity-cost theory, the data emphatically reject a positive correlation between unemployment and attacks against government and allied forces (p<.05%). There is no significant relationship between unemployment and the rate of insurgent attacks that kill civilians. We identify several potential explanations, introducing the notion of insurgent precision to adjudicate between the possibilities that predation on the one hand, and security measures and information costs on the other, account for the negative correlation between unemployment and violence in these three conflicts. ER -