Tag Archives | Natural Experimental

The Hidden Costs of War: Exposure to Armed Conflict and Birth Outcomes

Florencia Torche, Uri Shwed

Sociological Science, December 7, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a27

Research suggests that prenatal exposure to environmental stressors has negative effects after birth. However, capturing causal effects is difficult because exposed women may be selected on unobserved factors. We use the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war as a natural experiment and a siblings fixed-effects methodology to address unobserved selectivity by comparing exposed and unexposed births of the same mother. Findings indicate that exposure to war in early and mid-pregnancy lowers birth weight and increases the probability of low birth weight. The effect is not driven by geographic sorting, migration, or increased miscarriages. Given that birth weight predicts health, developmental, and socioeconomic outcomes, prenatal exposure to acute stress may have long-term effects over the life course.
Florenia Torche: Department of Sociology, New York University  Email: florencia.torche@nyu.edu

Uri Shwed: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben Gurion University of Negev  Email: shwed@bgu.ac.il

Acknowledgements: The authors thank Dvorit Angel of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics for preparing the data sets used in this study and Uri Goldstein for excellent research assistantship. We are also grateful to Yinon Cohen and Seymour Spilerman for helpful comments and suggestions.

  • Citation: Torche, Florencia, and Uri Shwed. 2015. “The Hidden Costs of War: Exposure to Armed Conflict and Birth Outcomes.” Sociological Science 2: 558-581.
  • Received: April 15, 2015.
  • Accepted: May 21, 2015.
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v2.a27

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