following the announcement. Rather, there was a slight improvement over the rest of 2017 and a large improvement in the second quarter of 2018.

We formally estimate the change in food assistance and investigate the uniformity of the increase over time and over different regions of the entire country. Specifically, we estimate the following specification using Ordinary Least Squares: where _Assistancert_ denotes the share of respondents that received food assistance in the past month in governorate _r_ and time period _t_ ; _Postrt_ denotes an indicator equaling one if the survey occurred after March 2017, which is the month during which the 2017 IPC announcement was made; _IPC_ ~~4~~ _r_ is an indicator equaling one if governorate _r_ was classified as IPC 4 in the 2017 IPC announcement, which was the most severe classification in the announcement; _ρr_ represents a governorate fixed effect; and _Xrt_ denote time-varying control variables.<sup>26</sup> The sample is restricted to households surveyed between January 2017 and July 2018.<sup>27</sup><sup>_,_28</sup> The estimate of _β_ 2 represents the increase in the share receiving food assistance in nonIPC 4 regions following the 2017 IPC announcement, holding violence and time-invariant and governorate-specific factors fixed; and _β_ 3 represents how much larger that increase was in IPC 4 regions. A positive estimate of _β_ 2 would correspond to the 2017 IPC announcement having a strong and immediate impact on mobilizing assistance; and a positive estimate of _β_ 3 would correspond to the increase being larger in IPC 4 regions than in the rest of the country.

In addition to estimating this change in the share receiving food assistance, we further estimate the change in food access to better understand how any increase in food assistance might have impacted food access. Specifically, we re-estimate the same specification as (1), but use average FCS as the dependent variables. Similar to the interpretation above, a positive estimate of _β_ 2 would correspond to an improvement in food access following the 2017 IPC announcement in non-IPC 4 regions; and a positive estimate of _β_ 3 would correspond to a larger improvement in IPC 4 regions relative to the rest of the country.<sup>29</sup>

# **5b. The Change in the Share Receiving Food Assistance**

Estimates of specification (1) are presented in Table 2, and describe the average change in the share receiving food assistance following the 2017 IPC announcement.<sup>30</sup> Column (1) of Table 2 estimates a very sparse specification including only the constant and a post indicator. The

> 26Control variables include the number of conflict fatalities in the month before the survey in the governorate, and four lags of the same variable.

> 27Although the national share of respondents receiving food assistance is reported since September 2015, the share at the governorate level is only reported from January 2017 onward.

> 28All specifications weight observations by the governorate’s share of the total population. All patterns are qualitatively identical when specifications are unweighted.

> 29See Appendix 9 for estimates using rCSI as the dependent variable.

> 30Estimates of all empirical specifications report standard errors clustered by the 21 governorates. All patterns are qualitatively identical if p-values are calculated to adjust for the small number of clusters (e.g., Wild Bootstrap, etc.).

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