Household expenditure in the wake of terrorism : evidence from high frequency in-home-scanner data

This paper adds to the scant literature on the impact of terrorism on consumer behaviour, focusing on household spending on goods that are sensitive to brain-stress neurocircuitry. These include sweet- and fat-rich foods but also home necessities and female-personal-hygiene products, the only female-targeted good in our data. We examine unique continuous in-home-scanner expenditure data for a representative sample of about 15,000 French households, observed in the days before and after the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert-hall. We find that the attack increased expenditure on sugar-rich food by over 5% but not that on salty food or soda drinks. Spending on home maintenance products went up by almost 9%. We detect an increase of 23.5% in expenditure on women’s personal hygiene products. We conclude that these effects are short-lived and driven by the responses of households with children, youths, and those residing within a few-hours ride of the place of the attack.