# 1 Introduction

The environmental conditions experienced in utero and in early life have profound inuence on human biology and long-term health (Golden, 1994; Martorell et al., 1994; Forsdahl, 1977; Barker, 1992; Bateson et al., 2004; Gluckman et al., 2007, 2008). Similarly, early life conditions have lasting and signicant impacts on adult economic outcomes (see reviews by Strauss and Thomas, 2008; Currie and Vogl, 2013). These ndings are highly relevant in the context of civil conicts, which cause considerable human suering, death and property destruction. Despite the potential for conict to contribute to lasting health impacts, the empirical evidence on long-term and intergenerational eects of conict on health is limited.<sup>1</sup> Lack of conict data at detailed geographic scale has made it dicult to measure precisely the consequences of conicts.

In this paper, I investigate the impacts of early childhood exposure to Nepal's 1996-2006 civil conict on women's nal adult height and on second-generation health using the 2016 Nepal Demographic Health Survey (NDHS) and village-level variation in conict intensity. By exploiting detailed geographic information on conict incidents (village-level conict intensity), I am able to identify the eects of exposure to conict more accurately than previous research.<sup>2</sup> The literature on the consequences of war, including in Nepal<sup>3</sup> has thus far mostly focused on conict variation at

> 1Previous studies have documented long-run eects at the cross-country level, suggesting conicts have large and negative immediate eects on overall economic growth. However, the recovery to equilibrium is rapid (see review by Blattman and Miguel, 2010). Correlated with war exposure, the literature has extensively documented long-run eects of exposures to stress on mental health (Persson and Rossin-Slater, 2018), height and diseases (Bozzoli et al., 2009), birth weight (Camacho, 2008; Quintana-Domeque and Ródenas-Serrano, 2017), and education and socioeconomic status (Almond, 2006). Previous research on conict has mostly focused on human capital accumulation during or shortly after conict (Akresh and De Walque, 2008; Bundervoet et al., 2009; Valente, 2014; Akresh et al., 2014; Pivovarova and Swee, 2015). A few recent studies have focused on the long-term impact of conict on human capital accumulation, with some nding no eect (Miguel and Roland, 2011) and others (Akresh et al., 2012; León, 2012; Justino et al., 2014; Palmer et al., 2016; Akbulut-Yuksel, 2017) nding signicant negative impacts. Domingues and Barre (2013) nds that the exposure to Mozambican civil war during childhood had adverse eect on women's adult height-for-age z-score.

> 2A common approach in the literature is to exploit conict variation at a broader regional level, which has the potential to misclassify one's exposure to conict and induce measurement errors. For instance, using detailed GPS data on distance between survey villages and conict sites, Akresh et al. (2014) show that substantial number of households in Eritrea were misclassied as being in non-conict region in the Akresh et al. (2012) paper that used less precise regional conict data and there are signicant dierences in the estimated eects of the Eritrea-Ethiopia conict between the two measures of the conict: eects are 87-188% larger using the GPS based measure than the regional based measure of the conict.

> 3Previous studies of Nepal's civil war are mostly focused on understanding the causes of the war: geographical terrain (Murshed and Gates, 2005; Bohara et al., 2006; Do and Iyer, 2010; Menon and van der Meulen Rodgers, 2015), economic exclusion and poverty (Murshed and Gates, 2005; Onesto, 2005; Do and Iyer, 2010), inequality (Murshed and Gates, 2005; Macours, 2011; Nepal et al., 2011), and lack of political representation (Murshed and Gates, 2005; Bohara et al., 2006; Macours, 2011). The little evidence documenting the consequences of the war, thus far, is focused on district level disaggregation and results are mixed - little to zero impact on human capital accumulation (Valente, 2014; Pivovarova and Swee, 2015), increased miscarriages (Valente, 2015) and positive impact

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