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While material deprivation is an important determinant of civil conflict, psychological factors can also explain the incentives for warfare. This paper considers whether and to what extent civilian perception of individual economic well-being, possibly influenced by hearts-and-minds tactics that are employed by insurgents, predicts war and peace onset. Using unique micro data bracketing the onset of the Nepalese Civil War, we find that perceived income inadequacy is associated with earlier war onset during periods of rebel recruitment, and with later peace onset in general. These results are mainly driven by the effect of perceived deprivation among marginalised communities on rebel-initiated violence, and hold regardless of whether we account for actual economic circumstance. Our results suggest that civilian perception of economic well-being ought to be considered seriously as a determinant of war and peace.

Is education the social leveler it promises to be? Nowhere is this question better addressed than in Singapore, the emblematic modern-day meritocracy where education has long been hailed as the most important ticket to elite status. In particular, what accounts for gender and ethnic gaps in enrollment into Singapore’s elite junior colleges—the key sorters in the country’s education system? We consider how the wealth of neighborhoods has combined with the elite status of schools to affect the social mobility of gender and ethnic groups. Analyzing data from 40 years of junior college yearbooks (1971–2010), we find persistent differences in educational opportunity. Women and Malays have historically experienced inequality in Singapore, and their student routes to becoming elites differ markedly. For female students, attending an elite junior college in a wealthy neighborhood is associated with wealthy neighborhoods that have a disproportionate number of elite girls’ secondary schools that feed into the junior colleges. By contrast, for Malays, not attending an elite junior college in a wealthy neighborhood has more to do with wealthy neighborhoods underrepresenting Malays in demographic composition. Elite families thus now include better educated women as well as men, yet Malays still rarely become better educated elites. These results underscore the need to carefully map the complex associations and mechanisms between gender and ethnic categorizations, the status of schools, and the characteristics of neighborhoods.

What is the impact of China's One-Child Policy on the labor market outcomes of the only children that it engendered? This paper quantifies the wage income gap between only children and their peers (i.e. those with siblings), and uncovers the channels that underlie it. We find that only children receive no higher wage income than their peers, once differences in schooling attainment and family background are accounted for. In fact, we learn that the OCP resulted in an only child wage penalty, which may be due to only children possessing inferior socio-emotional attributes that are valued in the labor market. Our results deliver important insights for China as only children continue to dominate its labor force at a rapid pace.

The prevalence of civil wars-and the massive human and economic costs that they impose-has attracted the attention of many scholars, including economists. This article briefly introduces three strands in the economics literature on civil war-causes, consequences and solutions-and identifies potential gaps in the existing literature which may be useful to students who are keen on pursuing further research on the subject.

This paper examines the effect of political favoritism on economic inequality in the short run and political polarization in the long run. We exploit the sudden death of an authoritarian leader - President Chiang Ching-Kuo of Taiwan - in 1988 to generate plausibly exogenous variation in partiality. We find that Chiang's nationalist regime conducted political favoritism broadly toward political immigrants via cronyism (allocating public sector positions) and also differentially toward specific subgroups of political immigrants via wage discrimination (offering higher payroll to these subgroups within the public sector). Favoritism led to a 7.2 percent immigrant payroll premium, which accounted for nearly three quarters of the immigrant-native payroll gap at the time. This in turn propelled overall income inequality by 4.5 percent. Moreover, political favoritism breeds political polarization in the long run by pulling apart the political views of immigrants and natives. Compared with natives, immigrants who were exposed to favoritism tend to adopt political positions that are aligned with the nationalist party today: they are more likely to support unification with China, and are more inclined to trust the mainland Chinese government and its citizens. Exposed immigrant (native) swing voters are also more (less) likely to vote for the nationalist party today.

This paper identifies war intensity effects of the 1992–1995 Bosnian War on schooling attainment, and explores possible channels of influence. Empirical identification relies on spatial variation in war intensity and variation in birth cohorts. I find that cohorts that endured greater war intensity are less likely to complete secondary schooling but not primary schooling. These effects are much stronger for males than for females, and draftee male cohorts experience deterioration in their physical and mental health relative to female and non-draftee cohorts, suggesting that the military draft may play an important role. Other possible mechanisms do not seem to matter.

The extensive coverage of household surveys in conflict regions in recent decades has fueled a growing literature on the microeconomic effects of war. In this paper, we use a unique panel dataset to quantify the impact of the Nepalese civil conflict on schooling attainment. Given longitudinal data, we are able to directly estimate unobserved individual heterogeneity and thus address selective wartime displacement. Despite the widely-held view that war is detrimental to human capital formation, we find no effect of war intensity on schooling attainment once unobserved individual heterogeneity is accounted for. We draw on supplementary data to explain our findings.

We examine the effect of inter-ethnic income inequality on conflict intensification in Mandate Palestine, using a novel panel dataset comprising district-level characteristics and conflict intensity across 18 districts during 1926-1945. We instrument Jewish-Arab income inequality by combining annual variation in rainfall with cross-sectional variation in pre-Mandate crop intensity, to extract exogenous variation in inequality between non-agrarian Jews and agrarian Arabs. We find a substantial e ect of inequality on conflict intensification, especially during periods where the relationship between Arabs and Jews were particularly strained. Our estimates are driven by Arab-initiated attacks, reflecting local average treatment effects of Arab farmers who move from agrarian work to violence in response to adverse rainfall shocks, suggesting that economic shocks coupled with existing economic segregation facilitate the transition into violence when opposing groups are economic substitutes. Further investigations reveal that inequality-driven violence was not the result of opportunity costs or appropriation, but rather an expression of resentment.

We exploit exogenous shifts in the cost of purchasing commercial weapons from the U.S. to uncover the causal effect of U.S. weapons purchases on political violence. We find that weapons purchases reduce the likelihood of political repression but increase the likelihood of onset of civil war in purchasing countries. The results suggest that state investment in military capability incites civil war in countries where state repression of an aggrieved opposition would have otherwise prevailed.

This paper uses a historical natural experiment – the opening of the Suez Canal – to investigate the relationship between geography and the formation of institutions. While the conventional view is that good geography (commodity endowment) inevitably favours the creation of extractive institutions, we discover that a second aspect of geography – location – may in fact encourage the establishment of non-extractive institutions when rent extraction by elites depends on the productivity of non-elites. Specifically, we find that entrepot colonies (Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements) received larger public investments in the post-Suez period than resource colonies (British India, Ceylon, and West Africa), after accounting for year effects and permanent differences across colonies. We demonstrate, using supplementary data, that the entrepot colonies’ locational advantage, coupled with their lack of extractable resources, plays a key role in explaining our empirical findings, even after accounting for other possible confounding factors.

The partitioning of political jurisdictions is becoming an increasingly common component of agreements to end ethnic conflict, although its impact on post-conflict recovery remains unclear. This paper studies the effects of the partition which ended the 1992-1995 Bosnian War on the post-war provision of public schooling. I find that partitioned municipalities provide 58 percent more primary schools and 37 percent more teachers (per capita). Driven mainly by convergent preferences for ethnically oriented schools, however, this arrangement delivers distributional consequences: in partitioned municipalities, ethnic majority children are more likely to complete primary schooling, while for ethnic minority children it is the opposite.

Social networks may be important to internal migrants in developing countries where the extent of information asymmetry is sizable. This paper identifies network effects among rural-urban migrants in Thailand by exploiting heterogeneous response to rainfall shocks as exogenous variation affecting network size. While networks substantially reduce the duration of job search, in this case they tend to direct migrants toward agricultural (rather than nonagricultural) jobs because the local average treatment effects estimator identifies what happens to employment outcomes when the agricultural part of the network increases.

We exploit exogenous shifts in the cost of purchasing commercial weapons from the U.S. to uncover the causal effect of U.S. weapons purchases on political violence. We find that weapons purchases reduce the likelihood of political repression but increase the likelihood of onset of civil war in purchasing countries. The results suggest that state investment in military capability incites civil war in countries where state repression of an aggrieved opposition would have otherwise prevailed.

The extensive coverage of household surveys in conflict regions in recent decades has fueled a growing literature on the microeconomic effects of war. Most researchers identify these effects using econometric methods, with difference-indifferences – which exploits variation across birth cohorts and war intensity – being the most popular. This paper highlights problems of endogenous war intensity and selfselection due to non-random displacement when using common empirical methods on cross-sectional data, and explains how they can be overcome with panel data. We draw on a unique set of cross-sectional and panel data from Nepal to demonstrate our proposition. Both unobserved locality factors and individual heterogeneity lead to huge swings in the estimates of war intensity effects. Our results imply that researchers ought to think carefully about empirical methods and explain possible statistical biases, especially when their results are used to inform policy decisions. For researchers who use panel data, we propose augmentations to existing methods.

The subject of civil war has received significant attention in recent years, due to numerous episodes of intrastate armed conflict around the world. However, more work remains to be done in quantifying the effects of civil wars on the welfare of individuals, as well as in uncovering the precise mechanisms through which the relationship operates. This study uses a unique data set that contains information on war casualties of the Bosnian War 1992 1995 at the municipality level, and exploits the variation in war intensity and birth cohorts of children, to identify the effects of the civil war on the schooling attainment of children. I find that individuals in the cohorts affected by war are less likely to complete secondary schooling, if they resided in municipalities that endured higher levels of war intensity. In addition, I find no significant effects of war on the completion of primary schooling. Ancillary evidence suggests that my estimates are most likely picking up immediate, rather than long-term effects. Furthermore, direct mechanisms such as the destruction of infrastructure and the out-migration of teachers do not seem to matter; instead, youth soldiering may be a key mechanism.