settings. Although Yemen is an understudied setting, the country has experienced both sharp and protracted shocks over the past decade that have increased poverty and food insecurity in the country. These shocks include a long-term issue with joblessness, fallout from the Arab Srping, and a significant increase in food prices in 2008 and 2011. However, the change in well-being due to these other shocks over the long term appear to be less pronounced than the short-term shocks analyzed in the current setting (e.g., WFP 2012; Dang and Ianchovichina 2016; World Bank 2017). Furthermore, comparing the capture analyzed here to shocks in other settings- there is a more precisely estimated decline in calorie consumption, which is relatively insensitive to shocks, in a matter of three months than was observed in response to the World Food Price Crisis in Afghanistan and the Global Financial Crisis (e.g., Brinkman et al. 2009; D’Souza and Joliffe 2012; and D’Souza and Joliffe 2014).

However, there are a number of questions unanswered by the current context. First, it is difficult to infer whether the subset of the population that initially maintained their consumption following the capture were able to do so through coping strategies that were no longer viable by December, or whether things progressively got worse over the course of the occupation. Section 5b demonstrates that there were coping strategies that households engaged in immediately following the capture, and thus some of consumption of households was probably maintained in this manner. However, the fact that there was a decline in calorie consumption, and the fact the magnitude of the expenditure changes increased so much by December, it is difficult to argue that things did not get worse as the occupation progressed. Furthermore, it is important to note that the survey ended one month before the Houthis significantly escalated began marching on Aden in the south of Yemen.

Second, these are all short-term changes, and it is unclear what might happen in the long term. For example, the coping strategies uncovered in this setting, such as loans from traders, might eventually become unavailable and the level of deprivation might significantly worsen; more sustained conflict might lead to more deprivation and cause women to be more rather than less engaged in household decision making out of necessity; and it is unclear how households might adapt after the cessation of conflict to avoid long-term adverse impacts of coping strategies (e.g., the speed with which households can improve diets and acquire basic health services following the conflict, etc.).

Third, as is the case in all conflicts, the times surrounding the empirical investigation in this setting were tumultuous. There were protests against the government, there was a quickly reversed removal of fuel subsidies prior to the capture of Sana‘a, and there was lingering political uncertainty from the political transition that occurred in 2012. Thus, it is possible that the results described here might be context-specific, and it is possible that other countries might not experience similar shocks from the capture of territory from the internationally recognized government. However, the robustness of the empirical findings suggest that it is unlikely that these other factors are driving the results.

And lastly, it is important to emphasize that it is difficult to generalize the results from this setting to present-day Yemen. As noted before, the conflict is more violent, there are 20