Terrorism Financing, Recruitment and Attacks

This paper investigates the effect of terrorism financing and recruitment on attacks. A Sharia-compliant institution in Pakistan induces exogenous variation in the funding of terrorist groups through their religious affiliation. I isolate the supply of terrorist attacks by following multiple terrorist groups with different affiliations operating in various cities. Higher terrorism financing, in a given location and period, generates more attacks in the same location and period. This effect increases in recruitment, measured through darkweb data, inputs by two judges and machine-learning. This evidence is consistent with terrorist organizations facing financial frictions to their internal capital market.