National Security Working Group.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Working Group on National Security met in Cambridge on February 24 and 25. NBER President and Research Associate Martin Feldstein, who directs the group, organized the meeting, at which the following topics were discussed:

Eli Berman, University of California, San Diego and NBER, and David D. Laitin, Stanford University, "Hard

Targets: Theory and Evidence on Suicide Attacks" (NBER Working Paper No. 11740)

Joel Slemrod, University of Michigan and NBER, and Naomi Feldman, Ben-Gurion University, "War, Social

Identity, and Taxation: Capitalizing Patriotism Through Voluntary Tax Compliance"

Eugene N. White, Rutgers University and NBER; Kim Oosterlinck, Free University of Brussels; and Filippo Occhino, Rutgers University, "How Occupied France Financed Its Own Exploitation in World War II"

Raymond Fisman, Harvard University and NBER; David Fisman, Princeton University; and Rakesh Khurana and Julia Galef, Harvard University, "Estimating the Value of Connections to Vice-President Cheney"

Alexander Gelber, Harvard University, "Military Enlistments: A Study of Compensating Differentials and Labor Supply"

Edward Miguel, University of California, Berkeley and NBER, and John Bellows, University of California, Berkeley, "War and Institutions in Sierra Leone"

Nell F. Johnson, Oxford University; and Michael Spagat, University of London; Jorge Restrepo, Universidad Javeriana; Oscar Becerra and Nicolas Suarez, Conflict Analysis Resource Center, Bogota, Colombia; Juan Camilo Bohorquez, Elvira Maria Restrepo, and Roberto Zarama, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia; "Universal Patterns Underlying Ongoing Wars and Terrorism"

James Dertouzos, RAND Corporation, "Recruiter Missioning, Market Quality, Recruiter Effort, and Enlistment"

David Loughran, RAND Corporation, "Earnings Loss of Activated Reservists"

James Hosek, RAND Corporation, "Analysis of Reserve Retirement Reform"

John T. Warner and Curtis J. Simon, Clemson University, "Uncertainty about Job Match Quality and Youth

Turnover: Evidence From U.S. Military Attrition"

Claude Berrebi, RAND Corporation, and Esteban F. Klor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "The Impact of Terrorism Across Industries: An Empirical Study"

Darius Lakdawalla, RAND Corporation and NBER, and Eric Talley, RAND Corporation, "Optimal Liability for Terrorism"

Berman and Laitin model the choice of tactics by rebels, bearing in mind that a successful suicide attack imposes the ultimate cost on the attacker and the organization. They first ask what a suicide attacker would have to believe to be deemed rational. They then embed the attacker and other operatives in a club-good model that emphasizes the function of voluntary religious organizations as providers of benign local public goods. The sacrifices that these groups demand make clubs well suited for organizing suicide attacks, a tactic in which defection by operatives (including the attacker) endangers the entire organization. The model also analyzes the choice of suicide attacks as a tactic, predicting that suicide will be used when targets are well protected and when damage is great. Those predictions are consistent with the patterns described above. The model has testable implications for tactic choice of terrorists and for damage achieved by different types of terrorists, which the authors find to be consistent with the data.

Feldman and Slemrod explore the relationship among war, government financing, and citizens' willingness to voluntarily comply...