The effect of armed conflict on accumulation of schooling: Results from Tajikistan

This paper uses differences in regional and temporal exposure to the 1992-1998 armed conflict in Tajikistan to study the effect of violent conflict on schooling outcomes. Data on the past damage to a household's residences from the 1999 Tajik Living Standards Survey is used as well as data on the events during the conflict within a conceptual framework that controls for important individual, household and community characteristics. Girls who were of school age during the conflict and lived in affected regions were less likely to complete their mandatory schooling than girls of the same age who lived in the regions relatively unaffected by conflict. The results also indicate that exposure to violent conflict had a large and statistically significant negative effect on the enrollment of girls. No effect of regional and household conflict exposure on education of boys was found. The results are robust to community and household fixed effects, selection into violence and migration.