Ebola and State Legitimacy
利用西非埃博拉疫情作为公共产品供给事件，研究发现疫情暴露程度越高的地区，民众对政府的信任度越高，且这一效应在政府应对有力的地区更为显著。
Abstract We exploit the West African Ebola epidemic as an event that necessitated the provision of a common-interest public good, Ebola control measures, to empirically investigate the effect of public good provision on state legitimacy. Our results show that state legitimacy, measured by trust in government authorities, increased with exposure to the epidemic. We argue, supported by results from SMS-message-based surveys, that a potentially important channel underlying this finding is a greater valuation of control measures in regions with intense transmission. Evidence further indicates that the effects of Ebola exposure are more pronounced in areas where governments responded relatively robustly to the epidemic.