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This is the first paper using household survey data from two countries involved in an international war (Eritrea and Ethiopia) to measure the conflict's impact on children's health in both nations. The identification strategy uses event data to exploit exogenous variation in the conflict's geographic extent and timing and the exposure of different children's birth cohorts to the fighting. The paper uniquely incorporates GPS information on the distance between survey villages and conflict sites to more accurately measure a child's war exposure. War-exposed children in both countries have lower height-for-age Z-scores, with the children in the war-instigating and losing country (Eritrea) suffering more than the winning nation (Ethiopia). Negative impacts on boys and girls of being born during the conflict are comparable to impacts for children alive at the time of the war. Effects are robust to including region-specific time trends, alternative conflict exposure measures, and an instrumental variables strategy.

This paper studies the impact of the 1999 Colombian Earthquake on child nutrition and schooling. The identification strategy combines household survey data with event data on the timing and location of the earthquake, exploiting the exogenous exposure of children to the shock. The paper uniquely identifies both the short- and medium-term impacts of the earthquake, combining two cross-sectional household surveys collected before the earthquake and two cross-sectional household surveys collected one and six years after the earthquake. Colombia provides a unique setting for our study because the government launched a very successful reconstruction program after the earthquake. Findings report a strong negative impact of the earthquake on child nutrition and schooling in the short-term. Relevantly, amid the aid received by the affected area, the negative consequences of the earthquake persist with a lesser degree in the medium-term, particularly for boys.

This paper contributes to the methodological literature on the estimation of international poverty lines for Latin America based on the official poverty lines chosen by the Latin American governments and commonly used in the public debate. The paper exploits a comprehensive data set of 86 up-to-date official extreme and total urban poverty lines across 18 countries in Latin America, as well as the recently updated values of the national purchasing power parity conversion factors from the 2011 International Comparison Program, and a set of harmonized household surveys. By using 3 and 6 US dollars per person a day at 2011 PPP as the extreme and total poverty lines for Latin America, this paper illustrates the sensitiveness of poverty rates to changes of the values of the poverty lines as a result of the recent update of the PPP values, the period of reference, and the relative cost of living across the countries in the region. The poverty lines with the 2011 PPP values lead to an increase in total poverty rates in Latin America when compared to the 2005 PPP values, while they leave the extreme poverty rate unaffected. In general, country-specific poverty rankings remain fairly stable to the values of the poverty lines selected. ; Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS)