Armed conflict and children's health - exploring new directions: The case of Kashmir

The exposure to violence in utero and early in life has adverse impacts on children's age-adjusted height (z-scores). Using the experience of the Kashmir insurgency, I find that stress during pregnancy and the limited access to health services in more conflict-affected regions of Jammu and Kashmir have different regional and cohort effects. Furthermore, the link between children's health at birth, mother's health during pregnancy, and children's height in the context of negative exogenous shocks has not been fully researched yet. Children small at birth and children with anemic mothers are shorter for their age. Overall, children more affected by the insurgency are 0.9 to 1.4 standard deviations smaller compared with children less affected by the insurgency. The effect is stronger for children who were born during peaks in violence. Gender differences are small. Finally, a robust finding in the health literature is that shorter children perform worse in schools, in jobs, and are sicker throughout their life. Here, children already negatively affected by the insurgency in their height, are also more likely to be sick in the two weeks prior to the survey.