this does not preclude other potential impacts. For instance, the body’s reaction to stress also involves parts of the brain that control mood, fear and motivation, opening the potential to analyze outcomes beyond physical health. Analyzing these outcomes is not possible with DHS data but it could feed future work.

The main results were unlikely to be driven by a change in the composition of mothers, either because of migration or fertility changes. They were also robust to alternative specifications that tested for the possibility of being driven by concurrent shocks, albeit with the significance of the effect faded when focusing only on singletons or on babies born within healthy birthweight ranges. Given variation in the size of the estimate across robustness specifications, the known problems with the report of birthweight in household surveys, and the low sample sizes at higher degrees of disaggregation (for instance, the group of low educated mothers), it may be relevant for future work to validate some of the headline findings with administrative data from birth records, which cover the universe of births.

Another important result was the absence of change in fetal mortality or in the gender ratio at birth associated with a violence shock. These results complement those from earlier studies in poorer countries and would support the hypothesis that the balance between scarring and selection effects differs across countries, and particularly, that in a middle-income developing country such as Colombia the scarring of health caused by a violence shock is stronger.

A gender split in the results would be in line with the medical literature where it is well established that male fetuses are more vulnerable to in utero shocks. However, unlike previous related work where the effects were mostly concentrated on boys, here I also found some impact of in utero violence exposure for girls.<sup>64</sup> It has been hypothesized that the mechanism for the intergenerational transmission of exposure to violence is the hormonal imbalance resulting from the maternal experience of stress. The effect for girls was not visible when exposure to violence was in the first trimester of gestation but only when it occurred in late stages, which is at odds with this expectation of the biological channel being more harmful in early fetal development.

I used information about maternal behaviors during pregnancy as an attempt to disentangle other possible channels. The nature of the data warrants care in the interpretation of these results, but the exploratory analysis presented here is worth continuing in future work. I found that exposure to violence led to changes in some maternal pregnancy behaviors. There was a reduction in the chance of attending antenatal care visits, receiving a tetanus vaccination and an increase in the likelihood of drinking alcohol, and these changes were significant for women pregnant with girls, and especially strong in the second trimester of gestation. The hypothesis is that the increase in these behaviors creates a harsher intrauterine environment for girls, leaving them more vulnerable to environmental stressors and thus to scarring during late gestation. In this period, stress hormones should be less harmful for fetuses, leaving more room for other intrauterine environmental factors to affect the pregnancy outcomes.

Although we cannot be conclusive with respect to whether these behavioral results are a reflection of a parental preference for boys over girls, the analysis complements the literature on skewed

> 64 The generalizability of these results for girls is subject to certain limitations. Importantly, the effect was only evident when considering the likelihood of being born with low birthweight, which is a measure suffering from reporting issues, especially when the data come from the mother’s recall.

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