being a direct victim is considerably low, the fear that these events arouse in the general population enables them to result in important impacts (Becker and Rubinstein 2011). Therefore, even in the context of sustained armed conflict this is a better measure of a local shock.

In addition to the variation in the occurrence of violent events at the municipal level, there is exogenous variation in the individual violence exposure resulting from the gestation stage of pregnancies within municipalities when such an event occurs. To obtain this high-frequency variability in the data, I link historical records of violent attacks by municipality of residence of the mother and month of occurrence of the events with the month of gestation coming from household survey data. Violence data are compiled by the _Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica_ (CNMH),<sup>2</sup> and household survey microdata with information about pregnancies and birth outcomes come from three rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS).<sup>3</sup> The impact of violence is assessed on weight at birth and neonatal mortality, measures that reflect the cumulative pregnancy conditions. Birthweight influences a wide range of outcomes over the life cycle, from adult disease prevalence to educational attainment, labor market outcomes, earnings and social status, highlighting its relevance (Black, Devereux, and Salvanes 2007; Case, Fertig, and Paxson 2005; Currie and Hyson 1999; Johnson and Schoeni 2011).

Overall, I found a negative effect of exposure to violence on the health of newborn babies, but with distinctive gender patterns. For boys, there was a scarring effect of exposure to a violence shock during early-pregnancy, reflected in a birthweight reduction of about 40 grams (gr), on average, and an increase in the probability of being born with low birthweight. The effects were much stronger for the boys of uneducated mothers, diminishing by 29 gr for each additional year of education of the mother. Despite these findings, I did not find strong evidence of an overall or predominantly male increase in fetal mortality associated with exposure to early-pregnancy shocks, even for the children of less-educated women, who are likely to be at the bottom end of the health distribution. In sum, unlike earlier findings for Nepal and DRC, the selection effect in Colombia appears to be dominated by the scarring effect.

These results contrast with the findings for baby girls. They appear to be stronger against earlypregnancy shocks, but those exposed to violence after the first trimester had higher probability of being born with low birthweight and of dying in the neonatal period. These effects were also driven by those whose mothers had no schooling. The differentiated gender pattern in the results, especially the lower resilience of boys to early-pregnancy shocks, is consistent with biomedical explanations about fetal responses to shocks (Kraemer 2000), whereby females are more adaptable to prenatal adversity and changing environmental conditions and males are less able to adjust and are thus at greater risk of mortality and morbidity.

However, if biologically girls should be more resilient to in utero shocks, what can explain the deterioration of health found for those exposed to violence in late pregnancy? Some additional results of this study provide suggestive, although not definitive, evidence that changes in maternal behaviors during pregnancy for women exposed to violence played a role in the worsening of newborn girls’ health. Women who were pregnant with a girl and were exposed to violence at this time were less likely to receive prenatal care and be vaccinated against tetanus during pregnancy,

> 2 National Centre of Historical Memory.

> 3 _Encuesta Nacional de Demografía y Salud_ in Spanish.

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