Victims of electoral violence and their children experience irreversible stunting: The long-term welfare effects of electoral violence

Roxana Gutiérrez-Romero

No 364, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: Despite the extensive literature on civil conflict, little is known about the medium- and long-term effects of electoral violence on young children and adolescents. This paper shows that electoral violence of low scale yet recursive nature has a detrimental effect on the height of children and adolescents of affected households. Our identification strategy uses the variation of electoral violence across time and space in Kenya during 1992−2013. We find that infants and adolescents exposed to electoral violence are shorter as adults if compared to similar people not exposed to violence during their growing age. We also find inter-generation effects as the children of the victims of electoral violence, particularly boys, also have reduced height-for-age. Higher food prices and changes in diet experienced during outbreaks of violence are important mechanisms. No impact is found on the educational attainment of school-aged pupils as electoral violence has been concentrated during the school holidays.

Keywords: electoral violence; household victimization; height-for-age; education; Kenya; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 I1 J24 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2021-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-hea and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hicn.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/HiCN-WP-364.docx.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:hic:wpaper:364

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tilman Brück () and () and () and ().