Civil Conflict and Human Capital Accumulation: The Long Term Effects of Political Violence in Perú

This paper provides empirical evidence of the long- and short-term effects of political violence exposure on human capital accumulation. Using a novel data set that registers all the violent acts and fatalities during the Peruvian civil conflict, Leon exploit the variation in war location and birth cohorts of children to identify the effect of the civil war on educational attainment. The results show that, conditional on being exposed to violence, the average person accumulates about 0.21 less years of education as an adult. In the short-term, the effects are stronger than in the long run. Further, children are able to catch-up if they experience violence once they have already started their schooling cycle, while if they are affected earlier in life the effect persists in the long run. He explore the potential causal mechanisms, finding that supply shocks delay entrance to school but don't cause lower educational achievement in the long-run. On the demand side, suggestive evidence shows that the effect on mother's health status and the subsequent effect on child health is what drives the long-run results. [Working Paper No. 245]