@article{3b7089437b5a4183aaa8c7c3667c701e,
title = "Nation building through foreign intervention: Evidence from discontinuities in military strategies",
abstract = "This study uses discontinuities in U.S. strategies employed during the Vietnam War to estimate their causal impacts. It identifies the effects of bombing by exploiting rounding thresholds in an algorithm used to target air strikes. Bombing increased the military and political activities of the communist insurgency, weakened local governance, and reduced noncommunist civic engagement. The study also exploits a spatial discontinuity across neighboring military regions that pursued different counterinsurgency strategies. A strategy emphasizing overwhelming firepower plausibly increased insurgent attacks and worsened attitudes toward the U.S. and South Vietnamese government, relative to a more hearts-and-mindsoriented approach.",
author = "Melissa Dell and Pablo Querubin",
note = "Funding Information: ∗Support for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation (Award Number 1628867). Katherine Chen, Peter Hickman, Luis Felipe Jaramillo, Nhung Le, Phan Ngoc, and Minh Trinh provided excellent research assistance. We thank Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Benjamin Crost, Nathan Hendren, Nathan Nunn, Jesse Shapiro, and seminar participants at the Becker Friedman Institute, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Clemson, Cornell, Duke, the ENSA Meeting at ASSA 2017, GWU, Harvard, ITAM, LSE, Michigan, MIT, the NBER Political Economy program meeting, the NBER Development of the American Economy program meeting, Northwestern, NYU, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, University of British Columbia, the University of Maryland and the Warwick/Princeton/Utah Political Economy Conference for helpful comments. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.",
year = "2018",
month = may,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1093/qje/qjx037",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "133",
pages = "701--764",
journal = "Quarterly Journal of Economics",
issn = "0033-5533",
publisher = "Oxford University Press",
number = "2",
}