violence who live in households that have previously experienced this type of violence.<sup>37</sup> Finally, we investigate changes in total hours worked, among both men and women, associated with exposure to herder-related violence. Figure 6 shows results where we use a continuous measure of total hours worked within the last week. In the post-planting season, we find that exposure to herder-related violence leads to an increase in total hours worked specifically for women living in households that have previously experienced exposure to herder-related violence. We find that exposure to herder-related violence among women who have previously experienced herder-related violence leads to roughly a 170 percent increase in total hours worked within the last week. Additionally, we find the opposite result for women living in households that did not recently experience exposure to herder-related violence. Among men, we find null results across all subsets of our sample in the post-planting season. These results highlight that the shift toward informal work, documented in Figure 4, leads to an overall increase in hours worked for women exposed to herder-related violence who live in households that have previously experienced this type of violence.

# **4.2 “Shadow of Violence” Mechanism**

The results in 4.1 imply that the labor responses to exposure to violence around the herder-farmer conflict operate through a mechanism that is often magnified by other, recent exposure to such violence. One could call such an implied mechanism as a labor response under a “shadow of violence,” that is an environment where the anticipation, and often the fear, of continued violence alters individuals’ labor-supply decisions.

As we show in the previous sub-section, labor responses to exposure to herder-related violence are more meaningful among households who have previously been exposed to herder-related violence. This suggests that labor responses operate through a mechanism of repeated exposure to violence and the threat of increasing exposure to violence in the future, rather than one-off idiosyncratic exposure. To further study this mechanism we leverage two contextual details about herder-related violence in Nigeria. First, herder-related violence spiked in 2018 and 2019—with the number of events increasing from less than 50 per quarter of the year to over 150, as shown in Figure 2. Second, between 2016 and 2018 three Nigerian states (i.e., Benue, Ekiti, and Taraba) enacted bans on open grazing, which raised tensions between farmers and herders and led to more frequent and more severe herder-related violence in these states.

To explore these channels, therefore, in this subsection, we present results where we differentiate effects across time (i.e., household surveyed in 2018-2019 vs. previous rounds) and space (i.e., household located in ban state vs. other states). Figure 7 reports shifts in both informal and agricultural work associated with exposure to herder-related violence differentiated across time and space. Panel (a) shows results on informal work where we use a binary indicator of whether an individual has worked on their own account or household enterprise within the last week. In the post-planting season, we find that

> 37For completeness, Figure A15 also presents effects on individual work for someone else outside of the home however, the results do not merit much attention and are left for reference to the Appendix.

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