Essays in public economics and economics of terrorism

This dissertation consists of three different papers in public economics and economics of terrorism. "Does Terrorism Have Economic Roots?" investigates the roots of international, domestic, and separatist terrorism using a new, extensive, multi-country panel data set obtained from MIPT (Memorial Institute of Prevention of Terrorism). I augment the MIPT data by recording the target country and the terrorist's country of origin. I also classify each terrorist incident as international, domestic, or separatist. International terrorism refers to terrorism committed by foreign nationals. Domestic terrorism refers to terrorism committed by domestic nationals. Separatist terrorism is committed by domestic nationals engaged in separatist causes. Using a panel data analysis with country fixed effects, I find striking results at considerable odds with the literature. Whereas the previous literature finds that terrorism is unrelated to economic conditions, I find that the richer the country, the fewer the terrorist attacks committed abroad by the country's nationals. Similarly, I find that when a country is richer, the country's nationals commit fewer terrorist attacks at home. I build an entirely new data set with regional GDP of separatist regions and find that the higher the GDP of the separatist region, the fewer the terrorist attacks committed by native separatists.;"Separatist Terrorism and Poverty in Southeastern Turkey" investigates the economic roots of separatist terrorism in Turkey. The political conventional wisdom is that poverty in highly Kurdish-populated, southeastern Turkey is one of the most important causes of separatist terrorism and Turkish-Kurdish conflict in Turkey. Therefore, many economic policies have been implemented to improve the economic conditions in the southeastern part of the country. Using the Global Terrorism Database, I find that there is a causal relationship between economic conditions in southeastern Turkey and separatist terrorism. I do not find that improvements in economic conditions in relatively poorer southeastern Turkey cause a decrease in separatist terrorist incidents in Turkey; on the contrary, it increases the separatist terrorist incidents significantly in the following year.;"Charitable Giving under Inequality Aversion" focuses on the relationship between voluntary giving and the degree of inequality aversion. Our model suggests that voluntary giving increases in the degree of inequality aversion for individuals of higher than average income. However, the sign of the effect is reversed for individuals who are poorer than the average. Contributions are monotonically increasing in the income level, holding the degree of inequality aversion constant. We test our theoretical findings using the General Social Survey data on the United States and show that empirical results support our predictions.