Bundervoet, Tom, Philip Verwimp, and Richard Akresh. 2009. “Health and Civil War in Rural Burundi.” Journal of Human Resources 44(2): 536–563.
We combine household survey data with event data on the timing and location of armed conflicts to examine the impact of Burundi’s civil war on children’s health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the war’s timing across provinces and the exposure of children’s birth cohorts to the fighting. After controlling for province of residence, birth cohort, individual and household characteristics, and province-specific time trends, we find an additional month of war exposure decreases children’s height for age z-scores by 0.047 standard deviations compared to nonexposed children. The effect is robust to specifications exploiting alternative sources of exogenous variation.
Tom Bundervoet is a graduate student in economics at the University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). Philip Verwimp is a post-doctoral researcher with the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders, Belgium) at the University of Antwerp and visiting researcher at ECARES (Université Libre de Bruxelles). Richard Akresh is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The authors would like to thank Jean-Marie Baland, Robert Bates, Tony Addison, Marcel Fafchamps, Olga Shemyakina, Peter Uvin, and participants at HiCN’s first annual workshop in 2006 in Berlin, at the 2006 CSAE conference, at the 2007 NEUDC, and at seminars in Namur, ECARES-ULB, and DIW-Berlin for helpful comments on earlier drafts. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning six months after publication through three years hence from the authors.