Essays on Applied Microeconomics: the Impacts of Internal Displacement

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays at the intersection of applied microeco- nomics and development economics. It tackles questions on the consequences of internal displacement on intra-household and intra-community behaviours, with a special focus on gender, social cohesion, and health outcomes. Chapter 1 provides evidence that exposure to events that trigger population outflows leads to early marriage by young women, putting them on a poor-life development path. Exploiting a novel dataset and the plausibly exogenous occurrence of earth- quakes within Indonesian provinces, I show that an earthquake raises the annual hazard of women marrying before age 18 by 44%, compared to non-exposed young women. Earthquakes’ overall effect on women’s marriage age masks substantial het- erogeneity. The effects are larger for earthquake-induced migrant versus left-behind women. Obtaining informal insurance from marriage induced migrants marry earlier as a financial coping strategy: a marriage payment, increased labour return when the husband joins the household, and social integration in receiving communities. These mechanisms do not have a role for left-behind women. I find evidence that a supply shock drives this result. Large population outflows and school building de- struction that led to a drop in schooling explain the results for left-behind women. Chapter 2 studies the long-term impacts of large inflows of forcibly displaced per- sons on displaced-hosting social participation outcomes. I exploit the construction of reservoirs during the Spanish dictatorship (1936-1975), which forced thousands of people into displacement. I profit from the margin of whether a pre-dictatorship project in 1933 planned the closest reservoir to a municipality, its size and distance to implement an instrumental variable approach. For this purpose, I rely on a newly- collected historical panel dataset on forced displacement and social participation. The results show a long-term and sizable decrease in voter turnout and the number of associations created in host communities. Additionally, the number of the forcibly displaced population relative to the natives mitigates the impacts. I propose two mechanisms: a decrease in general and institutional trust. A reservoir impacted natives and forcibly displaced populations differently, leading to inter-group clashes with long-lasting effects on between-group and institutional trust. Chapter 3 examines the impacts of the inflows of internally displaced people (IDP) on polio incidence in host communities. To tackle this question, I use the mass displacement of the population from the conflict-affected Federally Administered Tribal Areas (F.A.T.A.) to other districts in Pakistan from 2008 to 2022. In a difference-in-differences approach, I compare the new polio cases between host and non-host districts before and after 2007. I exploit the spatial distribution of dis- tricts relative to the border of the pre-colonial region of Pashtunistan to define the host and non-host districts. I find that districts that received the IDP population increased the number of additional polio cases per 100,000 inhabitants by 40% over the mean incidence compared to non-host districts. There are three underlying mechanisms: overpopulated communities with low immunization rates, precarious health conditions, and the congestion of health services in host communities.