January 23rd 2007

The working paper, written by professor José García Montalvo, empirically shows that the terrorist attacks in Madrid on the 11th of March, 2004, changed the final results of the general elections, held three days later.

Economists have recently turned their attention to the effects of terrorism. One much debated effect of terrorist attacks is its impact on the results of democratic elections. José Garcia Montalvo uses the electoral consequences of the terrorist attacks of the 11-M in Madrid to analyze this issue. He considers this particular experiment since the attack took place only three days before the 2004 Congressional Election, which allows the use of credible identification criteria. In particular, he uses the advance voting by Spanish residents abroad, who cast their vote before the terrorist attack, to identify the effect of the bombing. He exploits this macabre natural experiment to run a difference-in-differences estimation using data on three consecutive Congressional elections. His empirical results indicate that a terrorist attack can have a large impact on the outcome of democratic elections.

With this subject of great social interest, the Department of Economic and Business of UPF has reached the landmark of a 1,000 working papers. Over the 16 years of the department’s existence, professors and visiting professors of the department have written a thousand studies covering very different subjects with economic research as the bases of theses projects.

1000 working papers in such a short time represents an important volume of research. Taking into account this short period of existence and the number of its professors, the Department of Economic and Business of UPF is one of the most productive in Spain and Europe in terms of quality economic research. In the latest edition (December, 2006) of the Spanish Economic Review, there appears a ranking of the scientific production of the Economics Departments in Spain and the Department of UPF holds first place in accordance with all three established methodologies. After UPF, in this ranking come Departamento de Economía de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Departament d’Economia i Història Econòmica de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in either 2nd. or 3rd. place depending on methodology applied in establishing the classification.