The Intergenerational Impacts of War: Bombings and Child Labour in Vietnam

Abstract

While adverse consequences of war for the generation who lived through the conflict have been well documented in the literature, the intergenerational impacts of war have received far less attention. We provide causal evidence on the impact of bombings during the Vietnam War on the prevalence of child labour among second-generation Vietnamese, defined as those born after the Vietnam War. Our preferred results, which instrument for bombing intensity using distance to the 17th parallel north latitude, suggest that a 10% increase in the intensity of bombings generates a 1.9 percentage point increase in the probability that a child worked in the last 12 months. This result is robust to several checks. We examine several potential channels and find that this relationship is mediated through household poverty.

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