Melissa Dell
- Harvard Professor of Economics
- Recipant of Clark Medal
- Economic growth and political economy
- Poverty
- Trade-induced job loss on crime
- U.S. foreign intervention
- Weather on economic growth
Bombing strategy in Vietnam
- Discontinuities in U.S. strategies employed during the Vietnam War to estimate their causal impacts.
- 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.
- 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-minds-oriented approach.
Thoughts for evaluation
- Natural experiments
- Causal identification strategies
- Regression discountinuity
References
- Dell M, Querubin P. Nation Building Through Foreign Intervention: Evidence from Discontinuities in Military Strategies. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 2018;133:701–64. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx037.