businesses and foreign governments from removing some of its personnel from the country. The country already suffered from significant underemployment even before the capture of the capital (e.g., World Bank 2017), and one of the goals of this article is to investigate the degree to which the political uncertainty could have exacerbated these conditions.

Second, news reports suggest that safety was negatively impacted<sup>12</sup> , which likely affected household members‘ ability to leave their households and seek employment opportunities. The decline in safety reported by news agencies is further corroborated by the ongoing household survey that was being conducted as the capital was captured. The survey included a subjective welfare module, which separately asked the head of the household and their spouse whether they were satisfied with security. Following the capture of the capital, there was a significant decline in the share of households where either a household head or spouse reported to be very satisfied with security from 11.6 percent of households to 1 percent, and this decline was not observed in the rest of the country. Importantly, this decline in safety might have had a worse impact on women than men, where not a single woman interviewed following the capture of the city (out of 235 total) reported to be very satisfied with security, whereas women were able to report being satisfied with other aspects of their life.

And third, the supply chains providing goods and services to the capital city were likely disrupted. Prior to the conflict, Yemen relied on international sources for the vast majority of its consumption, where approximately 90 percent of its food was imported from abroad (e.g., World Bank 2017). Imports to the capital city primarily came through a port in Al Hudaydah, and were then transported by truck to the capital city.<sup>13</sup> Given the difficulty and uncertainty of transporting food and other goods across new checkpoints where safety and access were not guaranteed likely made it more difficult for goods to reach the capital city.

There is evidence consistent with this being a significant problem in Sana‘a following the capture of the city. Utilizing average prices collected at markets in the city by the World Food Programme (WFP) each month for 14 food items and commodities, there was a significant increase in the price of a number of goods following the capture of the city. In particular, figure 1 demonstrates that fresh food items and fuel, all of which are imported on a regular basis from abroad, had large price increases in the months following the capture of the city that were not evident over the same time period in the two years prior to the capture of the city.

Thus, at exactly the time that prices of necessary goods and services were potentially rising, households potentially had a decline in household income. A vast literature has investigated the potential impacts of adverse income shocks across a number of dimensions. For example, it has been shown that adverse income shocks adversely affect the quality of food consumption but not overall calorie consumption (e.g., Block et al. 2004), can reduce school attendance amongst school-aged children (e.g., Edmonds et al. 2009; etc.), and potentially force households to sell a

> 12See (accessed July 2017): https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/11/17/yemen-abusive-detention-rife-underhouthis.

> 13See FAO’s summary of food imports in Yemen at (accessed July 2017): http://www.fao.org/giews/countrybrief/country.jsp?code=YEM.

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