中文摘要
本文研究不安全状况对正规企业存续的影响。我们构建了一个灵活的理论框架，其中，不安全状况作为一种潜在的生产成本，影响企业的市场进入、退出以及是否以正规形式经营的决策。在实证分析中，我们将一份关于阿富汗企业的原始数据集与带有地理坐标的军事事件数据相结合，并以这些军事事件作为不安全状况的代理指标。在2003年后阿富汗的国家建设背景下，军事事件不仅反映暴力，也反映国家能力的扩张。对正规企业而言，后一渠道占据主导。因此，军事事件暴露程度的提高平均而言意味着实际面临的不安全程度下降，并对正规企业的存续产生正向影响。尽管如此，这一效应因行为主体、地点、时点和企业特征而呈现高度异质性。阿富汗冲突的特殊性在于外国的深度介入。利用这一特定的外生变异来源，我们识别了不安全程度下降对正规企业存续的因果效应。我们表明，经工具变量处理的军事事件暴露程度每提高1%，开展正规经营活动的概率就提高3.8%。
Abstract
This paper studies the effect of insecurity on formal firms’ existence. We develop a flexible theoretical framework in which insecurity, a latent production cost, affects firms’ market entry, exit, and formality decisions. In our empirical analysis, we combine an original dataset on Afghan firms with georeferenced data on military events that we use to proxy insecurity. In the state-building context of post-2003 Afghanistan, military events reflect not only violence but also state capacity expansion. For formal firms, this latter channel dominates. As a result, increased exposure to military events conveys on average a reduction in effective insecurity and positively impacts formal firm existence. Nonetheless, this effect is highly heterogeneous depending on actors, location, timing and firms’ characteristics. The Afghan conflict has the specificity of deeply involving foreign countries. Mobilizing this particular source of exogenous variation, we identify the causal effect of an insecurity reduction on formal firms’ existence. We show that an increase of 1% in the exposure to instrumented military events raises the formal activity probability by 3.8%.