Terrorism, media coverage, and education: evidence from al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya
Terrorism, media coverage, and education: evidence from al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya
We relate terrorist attacks to media signal coverage and schooling in Kenya to examine how terrorism alters the demand for education through perceived risks and returns. Exploiting variation in wireless signal coverage and attacks across space and time, we establish that media access reinforces negative effects of terrorism on schooling. Our results are robust to instrumenting both media signal and attacks. We also find that attacks raise self-reported fears for households with media access. Based on these insights, we estimate a simple structural model where heterogeneous households experiencing terrorism form beliefs about risks and returns to education. We allow these beliefs to be affected by media and find that households with media access significantly over-estimate fatality risks.
727-763
Alfano, Marco
0df2fd10-8c2e-444f-9ec2-5c5e74c1a99e
Goerlach, Joseph-Simon
aaf42743-f864-4d06-bef6-0d6b51c32df3
April 2023
Alfano, Marco
0df2fd10-8c2e-444f-9ec2-5c5e74c1a99e
Goerlach, Joseph-Simon
aaf42743-f864-4d06-bef6-0d6b51c32df3
Alfano, Marco and Goerlach, Joseph-Simon
(2023)
Terrorism, media coverage, and education: evidence from al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya.
Journal of the European Economic Association, 21 (2), .
(doi:10.1093/jeea/jvac054).
Abstract
We relate terrorist attacks to media signal coverage and schooling in Kenya to examine how terrorism alters the demand for education through perceived risks and returns. Exploiting variation in wireless signal coverage and attacks across space and time, we establish that media access reinforces negative effects of terrorism on schooling. Our results are robust to instrumenting both media signal and attacks. We also find that attacks raise self-reported fears for households with media access. Based on these insights, we estimate a simple structural model where heterogeneous households experiencing terrorism form beliefs about risks and returns to education. We allow these beliefs to be affected by media and find that households with media access significantly over-estimate fatality risks.
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jvac054
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e-pub ahead of print date: 10 October 2022
Published date: April 2023
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 507097
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/507097
ISSN: 1542-4766
PURE UUID: 54acda92-b9f4-42a5-a296-4b880df4f3ab
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Date deposited: 26 Nov 2025 17:50
Last modified: 27 Nov 2025 03:14
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Author:
Marco Alfano
Author:
Joseph-Simon Goerlach
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