Abstract
AbstractWe exploit the timing of the London bombings of July 2005, coinciding with a large‐scale national survey of adolescents, to identify the impact of extremist Islamic terror attacks on the well‐being of adolescent Muslims. Our analysis reveals interesting gender differences. We find evidence of a decline in the happiness of Muslim teenage girls after the bombings, which is also accompanied by a rise in expectations of facing discrimination in the labour market. These findings are robust to several falsification tests. However, we fail to uncover compelling evidence of any impact of the bombings on Muslim teenage boys.
Highlights
Since 9/11, the impact of extremist Islamic terrorism on the labour market outcomes of Muslims has attracted considerable research attention
The Scandinavian Journal of Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Foreningen for utgivande av the SJE/The editors of The Scandinavian Journal of Economics
For Muslim teenage boys, there is little evidence to suggest an impact of the bombings on happiness, and at best, tentative evidence of an increase in expectations of facing discrimination
Summary
Since 9/11, the impact of extremist Islamic terrorism on the labour market outcomes of Muslims has attracted considerable research attention (see, inter alia, Åslund and Rooth, 2005; Davila and Mora, 2005; Kaushal et al, 2007). In light of evidence to suggest that Muslims face more hostile social environments following extremist Islamic terror attacks, researchers have begun to probe whether these attacks harm outcomes shaped in part by the social context To date, this line of enquiry has focused on assimilation (Gould and Klor, 2016) and health (Johnston and Lordan, 2012), including the health consequences for newborns of maternal exposure to increased hostility (Lauderdale, 2006). We find evidence of a decline in the happiness of Muslim teenage girls after the bombings, which is accompanied by a rise in expectations of facing discrimination in the labour market These findings emerge consistently throughout a battery of falsification tests. These empirical results, which are based on a systematic analysis of large-scale survey data, are in line with qualitative evidence suggesting that Muslim women have been affected by the increase in Islamophobia following the London bombings, a phenomenon that is attributed to Muslim women being more identifiable (Change Institute, 2009a)
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