Education and Conflict: Evidence from a Policy Experiment in Indonesia

Dominic Rohner and Alessandro Saia

No 13509, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of school construction on the likelihood of conflict, drawing on a policy experiment in Indonesia, and collecting our own novel dataset on political violence for 289 districts in Indonesia over the period 1955-1994. We find that education has a strong, robust and quantitatively sizeable conflict-reducing impact. It is shown that the channels of transmission are both related to economic factors as well as to an increase in inter-religious trust and tolerance. Interestingly, while societal mechanisms are found to have an immediate impact, economic channels only gain importance after some years. We also show that school construction results in a shift away from violent means of expression (armed conflict) towards non-violent ones (peaceful protests).

Keywords: Education; Conflict; Civil war; Fighting; Schools; Returns to education; Polarization; Protest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D74 H52 I20 N45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-his, nep-pol, nep-sea and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13509 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Education and Conflict Evidence from a Policy Experiment in Indonesia (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13509

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13509

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().