Sandra Sequeira
(LSE)
will give a presentation on
Forced Displacement and Human Capital
Abstract: We study the impact of conflict-driven displacement on human capital accumulation and occupational shifts. We focus on the Mozambican civil war (1977 − 1992), during which millions of civilians fled to the countryside, to cities, and to refugee camps in neighboring countries. We reconstruct the movements of the entire Mozambican population during this period to examine the consequences of multiple displacement trajectories in a unified setting. First, we describe the educational outcomes of the universe of individuals displaced during their school-going age. Second, we identify their age at move and implement a movers design to estimate exposure effects, focusing on moves occurring in high-conflict areas. We find that children who were still in their primary school-going years experienced strong and positive displacement effects on schooling. Third, we compare children of families separated during the war, using children who stayed behind as a counterfactual to each child’s displacement trajectory. Displacement is associated with increases in educational investments and shifts out of agricultural employment, with the largest effects experienced by rural-born children escaping to urban areas. The children who stayed behind do not report lower levels of schooling compared to their respective cohorts in their districts of birth. Fourth, we unpack the mechanisms and jointly estimate place-based and uprootedness effects. Fifth, we conduct a survey in Mozambique’s largest northern city, whose population doubled during the civil war: those displaced to the city have significantly higher education than their siblings in the countryside, and have converged to the levels of schooling of the non-mover urban-born individuals. However, those displaced exhibit significantly lower social/civic capital and have worse mental health, even three decades after the war ended. Our findings demonstrate that displacement shocks can stimulate human capital investments and break ties with subsistence agriculture. However, this comes at the cost of enduring social and psychological traumas.