in regions where women have fewer, or worse, labor market opportunities. On the other hand, violence increases the costs of working through the perceived risk of violence, and these costs may be especially salient for workers on the margin of the decision to work. Such a relationship would emerge in time-series data where regions with dierent exposure levels to violence would experience dierent FLFP rates accordingly. For example, Khan et al. [2017] nd a short-lived negative eect of terrorism on labor market outcomes for Pakistani women that the authors attribute to fear.<sup>3</sup> Using national-level panel data and novel instrumental variables, Berrebi and Ostwald [2016] nd a negative impact of terrorism over female labor force participation. When their cross-country results are updated for the period 1990-2016, however, they prove to be sensitive to the inclusion of explanatory variables in the most parsimonious specications. As Table 1 shows, the negative relation between violence (approximated by the three variables used throughout this paper) and FLFP loses signicance after the inclusion of control variables, which hints the existence of some other factors that drive both violence and FLFP. We argue that analyzing local labor markets as we do alleviates the confounding factors problem by exploiting within-country variations in FLFP and violence.

Focusing on the within-country variation in violence, however, may reveal a positive relationship between violence and FLFP. For instance, Gallegos [2012] nds that exposure to conict between 1980 and 2000 increased the probability of women working in Peru as a mechanism to complement household's income. Menon and van der Meulen Rodgers [2015] show how civil war in Nepal aected women's decisions about engaging in work outside the home. Kreibaum and Klasen [2015] estimate the eect of Vietnam's war on FLFP but they use a cohorts approach to nd that the "added worker" eect is positive for people directly aected by the war and smaller for those individuals entering working age after the end of the conict. Although these last two articles depart from our specic focus on terrorism, they are still relevant because they (i) clearly develop the argument of the "additional worker eect" that induces women to participate in the labor force as men are displaced from the household, dead or disabled; (ii) focus on countries with similar work morale, culture, and income level; and (iii) focus at the sub-region level and have similar methodological concerns as we do.

This paper focuses on four countries with particularly low FLFP rates. Terrorist attacks have been persistent in these countries after the end of the crudest phase of civil conicts experienced decades ago. Terrorist attacks in these countries are motivated mainly by political and religious reasons that, fortunately for our empirical approach, are not caused by FLFP per se. Indeed, our identication strategy rests on the fact that terrorist attacks are typically focused in specic places within countries and are not a function of an individual woman's decision to work. Due to data limitations, we are not able to provide a formal account of the motivations for each attack. However, we know that the main driver of the India-Bangladesh conict is rooted in India's 1947 geographic partition, which led to creation of an Islamic majority population in Bangladesh and Pakistan. This issue has remained unsolved, and borders have been disputed and subject

> 3Khan et al. [2017] use individual level data to capture characteristics of the labor force but use district level data for violence measures. We argue this is awed, as it delivers articially signicant estimates of the eect, and deal with it explicitly in our estimation approach.

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