experienced conflict and who was alive during the war. For these baseline regressions in Table 5, since all of these provinces experienced conflict at some point during this time period, we only exploit the timing and duration of the crisis and the related exposure of a child to the war. This leaves a sample of 1027 children, of which 657 were exposed to the conflict. Results in column 1 show a strong negative impact of the civil war on children’s health. Those children who were exposed to the war have a height for age z-score 0.618 standard deviations lower than nonexposed children, a reduction that is statistically significant at the one percent level.<sup>22</sup> The child development literature suggests child stunting usually occurs between 6 and 24 months of age and is considered permanent, with minimal catch-up growth at older ages (Martorell and Habicht, 1986; Martorell, Khan, and Schroeder, 1994). As a robustness check to the column 1 regression, we use an alternative conflict shock definition in which only children aged 6 to 24 months old when the conflict occurred in their province are considered exposed to the shock. In this manner, children older than 24 months in a province that experienced conflict are not considered exposed to the war.<sup>23</sup> Results in column 2 are similar to the baseline model with children who are exposed to the war having 0.435 standard deviations lower height for age z-scores, and the coefficient is significant at the five percent level.

In column 3, we include additional household controls in the regression, such as the child’s gender, whether the head of household is educated, whether the child is in a femaleheaded household, and the head of household’s age and marital status. The coefficient on the civil war shock is unchanged from the column 1 regression and remains significant at the one percent level. Results indicate a strong positive association between height for age z-scores and the child’s gender, with girls having improved height for age z-scores.<sup>24</sup> In addition, children in households with educated heads have better height for age z-scores.<sup>25</sup>

> 22 Our analysis is likely to underestimate the conflict’s true health effect since we do not have data for children who died prior to the 1998 survey.  The reported effects are thus likely to be lower bounds of the true impact and should be interpreted as the war’s impact on a child’s health, conditional on the child surviving to be recorded in the survey. 23 With this alternative conflict shock definition, 349 of the 1027 children are in this restricted age range and live in a province that experienced civil war.

> 24 A similar gender effect is also found by Thomas, Lavy, and Strauss (1996) in their analysis of anthropometric outcomes in Côte d’Ivoire, although in their study, the association is weaker.  We test for dependency between the civil war shock and gender but the interaction is not statistically significant.

> 25 The positive correlation between parental education and child health is among the most persistent findings in the empirical literature on child health production functions (see Rosenzweig and Schultz (1982) and Strauss and Thomas (1995) for an overview of this literature).

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