To date, there has been scant theoretical or empirical research on how terrorism affects business. This project aims to answer for core questions about what has been coined as ‘financial resilience’:

  1.   How do businesses respond in the face of terrorism?
  2.   What are the determinants of their responses?
  3.   Which businesses are most resilience to terrorism?
  4.   How can other businesses enhance their own resilience to terrorism?

Preliminary research indicates that independent or family-owned firms outperform other business types across numerous metrics due to superior social capital. Additionally, businesses appear to bolster their financial resilience by becoming more geographically dispersed and socially responsible. These incipient findings hold potentially profound implications for businesses around the world. With a mixed-methods research design, this project rigorously tests these and other novel propositions about financial resilience and thereby develop a new, actionable, substantively meaningful research agenda of genuine consequence to both academic and policy communities.

Project Principal Investigators