Reply to Golan et al.: Revisiting the Statistical Analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Confirms That Both Sides Retaliate

Abstract

We thank Golan and Rosenblatt (1) for their comments on our analysis (2), which we address in turn. First, Golan and Rosenblatt suggest that the time series may be nonstationary (that is, the distribution of the variables in the data may change over time). Our original paper addressed this concern in two ways. First, we tested for stationarity using the standard Dickey Fuller test. The results (table S2 in ref. 2) supported the stationarity hypothesis. Second, we included year dummy variables to control for structural breaks. We chose years rather than political events for these dummy variables to avoid the arbitrariness inherent in the latter approach. Thus, nonstationarity is not a concern for our conclusions. Nevertheless, Golan …