Essays on the Economic Consequences of Conflict

Abstract

This dissertation strives to understand the short and long-run consequences of armed conflict. In short-run, as conflict increases, parents are less likely to send their children to school or take them to health facilities and more likely to keep them home. Less time in school might translate to more time spent at work for these children. Coping with conflict can disrupt human capital accumulation of children and exposes them to adverse experiences, the effects of which can also last into adulthood. Some of the persistent effects of conflict on educational and health outcomes have been widely studied in the literature. Nevertheless, relatively less is known about how these childhood exposures affect adult behavior, beliefs, and attitudes. One of the goals of this dissertation is to study such long-lasting impacts of childhood exposure to conflict. In the first chapter, “Victims of Consequence: Evidence on Child Outcomes using Microdata from a Civil War”, joint with Giri Subramaniam, we study the short-run impacts of violent events on child time allocation, curative health-care, and education. Exploiting the spatial and temporal variation in exposure to local-level armed conflict, we find that an increase in violent events: (i) leads to an increase in contemporaneous hours worked by children, with the effect being substantial for agricultural work; (ii) decreases the likelihood of parents taking their children to visit a health-care facility to seek curative care; and (iii) results in a reduced likelihood of attending school, along with a decline in years of education. Overall, the results indicate that war affected schooling and time allocation of boys whereas girls were less likely to get curative health-care. The second chapter of this dissertation, “Do Adverse Childhood Experience Shape Violent and Abusive Adult Behavior?", is motivated by the fact that family violence is pervasive and has detrimental economic consequences. Nevertheless, very little is known about how childhood experiences influence this behavior. In this study, I explore long-run determinants of family violence by linking exposure to adverse circumstances in childhood to the perpetration of abuse and neglect in adulthood. In particular, I examine the effects of men’s exposure to the Nepalese Civil War (1996-2006) in childhood. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation in childhood exposure to the armed conflict from ages 0 to 16, I find that exposed men are less likely to perpetrate spousal violence and to display controlling behaviors. Additionally, children of exposed fathers are less likely to experience violent disciplining at home. They also work fewer hours per week and are less likely to be involved in dangerous working conditions. In the third chapter, “Exploring the Channels”, I study the potential mechanisms that underlie the empirical results established by Chapter 2. I find that exposed men are more likely to complete secondary schooling, be employed at skilled non-agricultural occupations, and marry women who are more likely to have completed primary school and currently working. The most pertinent channel is that these men are less likely to justify wife-beating in different scenarios. Next, I assess the implications of the empirical results on the theories of domestic violence. Existing theories highlight two broader motives for perpetrating domestic violence: “Expressive” and “Instrumental”. Violence is instrumental if it is used to extract resources from the victim whereas it is expressive if the perpetrator gains direct non- pecuniary (dis)utility from it. I find that my results resonate strongly with “Expressive” theories of domestic violence where men who were exposed to conflict in childhood find using violence at home distasteful.