Long-term impact of early-life exposure to war logistics during the Dien Bien Phu campaign on education and development

This paper studies the long-term impacts of early-life exposure to wartime mobilization during the 1954 Dien Bien Phu Campaign in Vietnam. While fighting was limited to a remote valley, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam organized a massive logistics campaign that mobilized rural households across distant provinces. Exploiting variation in exposure to supply corridors, we show that children exposed in utero or early childhood attained 1.4 fewer years of education, had worse labor market outcomes, lower living standards, poorer health, earlier age at first birth, and higher number of children in adulthood. Adult height was unaffected, indicating that resource diversion, reduced parental care, and psychosocial stress rather than famine are plausible mechanisms consistent with the observed pattern of results, while severe famine is less likely to be the dominant channel given the null effects on adult height. These findings reveal an overlooked dimension of war: the lasting civilian costs of large-scale wartime mobilization far from combat zones.