The Forging of a Rebel

We use variation in exposure to victimization of 1,537 households of eastern Congo for each year of 1990–2013 to examine the formation of preferences to participate in armed groups. In this context, most armed groups are Congolese militia, whose objective is fighting foreign armed groups. We find that foreign armed group attacks on household members are associated with a larger propensity that individuals join a Congolese militia in subsequent years. The results are consistent with the formation of preferences arising from parochial altruism towards the family to fight foreign perpetrators. Specifically, we find that the effect is driven by the most gruesome of those attacks, by those that take place at a young age, and persists for several years. Consistent with parochial altruism, we find that the effect is largest when the victim is a household member or the village chief, smaller when the victim is another household in the village, and insignificant if the victim is in a nearby village. To examine the external validity of our result, we analyze heterogeneous effects by weakness of the state. We find that the response is concentrated in village-year observations in which state forces are absent. Finally, we show that, to undo this effect, the yearly per capita income outside armed groups would have to permanently increase 18.2-fold. These results suggest that intrinsic preferences are important for armed group participation relative to economic incentives, and emphasize their interaction with state weakness. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

我们利用1990 - 2013年期间刚果东部1537户家庭每年遭受侵害情况的差异，来研究参与武装团体的偏好形成。在此背景下，大多数武装团体是刚果民兵，其目标是打击外国武装团体。我们发现，外国武装团体对家庭成员的攻击与个人在随后几年加入刚果民兵的更大倾向相关。结果与因对家庭的狭隘利他主义而产生的对抗外国加害者的偏好形成相符。具体而言，我们发现这种影响是由那些最残忍的攻击、在年轻时发生的攻击所驱动的，并且会持续数年。与狭隘利他主义相符的是，我们发现当受害者是家庭成员或村长时，这种影响最大；当受害者是村里的其他家庭时，影响较小；如果受害者在附近村庄，则影响不显著。为了检验我们结果的外部有效性，我们根据国家的薄弱程度分析了异质性影响。我们发现这种反应集中在没有国家军队的村 - 年观测数据中。最后，我们表明，要消除这种影响，武装团体之外的人均年收入必须永久性地提高18.2倍。这些结果表明，相对于经济激励，内在偏好对参与武装团体很重要，并强调了它们与国家薄弱性的相互作用。 美国国家经济研究局（NBER）工作论文系列的机构订阅者以及发展中国家的居民可以在www.nber.org上免费下载本文。