Essays on the Effect of Armed Conflicts on the Accumulation of Human Capita

This dissertation comprises of three papers that measure the long-run impact of armed conflicts on the accumulation of human capital, and the correlates of female bargaining power. Particularly, the effect of residing in conflict regions on children's health and education. This effect can happen through a direct or an indirect exposure to violence, and it negatively impacts the country on both macroeconomic level and microeconomic level. The third paper examines the determinants of women empowerment in Ivory Coast and explores the impact of the Ivorian war on female empowerment.;In chapter 1, I examine the long-term effect of armed conflicts on children's health, who were not directly exposed to violence, and were born after the end of the Ivorian civil war. I use Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data of Ivory Coast collected before and five years after the end of the civil war, and data on the exact date and location of violent events. I first estimate the difference in HAZ using spatial variation in violence between regions for the war cohort that is exposed to violence during infancy. I then use a variation of the duration of exposure to violence. I find an insignificant impact of violence on later cohort's HAZ between the conflict and non-conflict regions. In addition, this paper explores, qualitatively, the channels by which civil wars affect children's health. The results suggest that the Ivorian civil war affected children's health through channels that had short-term effects.;In chapter 2, I used a difference-in-differences model to estimate the long-lasting effect of the Ivorian civil war on the Ivorian children who were at primary school-age during or after the war. I find that the Ivorian war has a significantly negative effect on the war cohort when compared to the pre-war cohort. The impact is higher for boys than girls. I find that the negative impact on war cohort seems to decline as the primary school-grades progress. In addition, I find a greater significant negative effect on primary school grade completion for all grades levels except for 6th grade. Similarly, the difference is greater for boys.;Women empowerment in chapter 3 is measured using two methods: women's level of participation in household decision-making and women's attitude toward gender inequality. I, first, examine the main determinants in using data from Ivory Coast collected after the end of the civil war. Second, I examine the potential relationship between the different measures of female empowerment. Third, I measure the effect of the Ivorian civil war on female empowerment.;In this chapter, I use a multinomial logit regression model to estimate those effects. I find that the relationship between the correlates and women's participation in decision-making varies by the type of decisions and the level of participation, such that, age has a significant positive relationship with decisions made jointly with husband. On the other hand, education significantly reduces women's justification of beating wife for all the tested reasons.;Additionally, I examine the effect of the Ivorian civil war on female empowerment in the country by examining the difference in women's participation in public and private decisions between three groups of women based on their first marriage time. I find that the Ivorian war negatively impacted female power of women who married during the civil war compared to women who married before the civil war. Although, war-married women residing in conflict regions have a higher participation in shared private and alone public decision compared to women in war-married women in non-conflict regions. The impact is greater on post-war married women to war married women.