The Cost of Fear: Impact of Violence Risk on Child Health During Conflict

Résumé

The fear of exposure to conflict events often triggers changes in the behavior of economic agents even before/without any manifestation of violence in a given area. It generates a treatment status (exposure to the adverse effects of conflict) that goes beyond violence incidence. This paper develops a new approach to capture such treatment. Violence is modeled as a space-time stochastic process with an unknown underlying distribution that is backed out of the observed pattern of conflict events. A new risk measure is built from this density and used to evaluate the impact of conflict on child health using data from Ivory Coast and Uganda. The empirical evidence suggests that conflict is a local public bad, with cohorts of children exposed to high risk of violence equally suffering major health setbacks even when this risk does not materialize in violent events around them.