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Subjective Well-Being and Armed Conflict: Evidence from Bosnia-Herzegovina

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Abstract

We analyze survey data from Bosnia and Herzegovina collected after the 1992–1995 Bosnian War to answer the following questions: How does individual subjective well-being evolve in the post-conflict period? Does exposure to conflict have an important role in determining one’s post-war experiences? Our identification strategy relies on regional and individual-level variation in exposure to the conflict. Individual war-related trauma has a negative, significant, and lasting impact on subjective well-being. The effect is stronger for those displaced during the war. Municipality-level conflict measures are not significantly associated with subjective well-being once municipality fixed effects are accounted for.

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Notes

  1. “Mladic shuns ‘monstrous’ charges.” June 3, 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13636210 (Accessed: June 3, 2011).

  2. Cesur et al. (2011) estimate that the health care costs of soldiers who experienced the combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder amount to at least 1.5 billion U.S. dollars. We are not aware of similar attempts to evaluate the costs of war-induced stress for civilians.

  3. Studies that explore the relationship between war-induced stress and long-term health outcomes of former soldiers find a strong negative relationship between the two (e.g. Costa and Kahn 2010; Blattman and Annan 2010; Cesur et al. 2011).

  4. “Hedonic adaptation”, a term often used in the psychology literature, is also known as habituation.

  5. Starting in 1992, an informal army of Bosnian Serbs, that was created by Radovan Karadzic with the support of Bogdan Milosevic, and Serbian nationalists started attacking areas in BiH with the purpose of creating mono-ethnic areas only for Serbs. (Source: http://www.balkandevelopment.org/edu_bos.html, Accessed: October 13, 2011).

  6. BiH was not surveyed in the first two waves of the WVS, nor in the most recent fifth wave.

  7. The shortcoming of these data is that the 1991 census likely does not reflect the true composition of the population after the war due to war-related displacements and deaths.

  8. It is also known as the Living Measurement Standards Study (LSMS) survey for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  9. Do and Iyer (2012), Kondylis (2010) and Swee (2011) used the RDC dataset in combination with the Living in BiH data to study the effect of exposure to armed conflict in BiH on individual outcomes.

  10. Choosing other cut-off points, e.g. as in Swee (2011), or dividing the casualty rate into low and high categories with cut-offs at 2 % and 4 % respectively does not have an impact on our regression estimates.

  11. These data were collected by Swee (2011) from the UNHCR documents.

  12. Wave 2, Module b2, q. 39e; Wave 3, Module c2, q. 39f; Wave 4, Module d2, q.39f.

  13. Living in BiH, Waves 3 and 4, Module 4, q. 48.

  14. A similar strategy was used by Schindler and Brück (2011) who used ethnicity markers from a survey conducted in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide to identify potential Tutsi victims and match them to those who reported deaths on children or close relatives during the 1994 genocide in the post-genocide survey.

  15. We also estimated regressions that include dummy variables for all types of employment status. The estimated coefficient is statistically significant only for the dummy variable denoting unemployment.

  16. In the regressions we use Bosniak and “other ethnic group” as the reference category. The “other ethnic group” category is very small and we are unable to include municipality fixed effects in the regressions due to insufficient number of observations if we were to include an indicator for “other ethnic group status” in the regression.

  17. The regression estimates received from the baseline model on the pooled WVS data indicate a similar effect of socio-economic and demographic characteristics on one’s satisfaction with life to those yielded using the Living in BiH data (not reported).

  18. Household income is conventionally added to the regression equation in the analysis of life satisfaction. The comprehensive measures of household income and consumption are only available in the 2001 and 2004 surveys and life satisfaction data are available only in 2002, 2003 and 2004 surveys; thus we do not have panel data on household income or consumption.

  19. We also estimated a set of regressions for the sample of individuals who did not move during their lifetime and the results are very similar (not reported).

  20. As a robustness check, we estimated the set of baseline regressions for the sample of individuals who were age 16 and above at the start of the war in 1992. Again, the results are similar to the ones reported in Table 4.

  21. A recent study finds that an increase in crime in Mexico had a negative effect on individuals’ mental health and subsequently on their labor market outcomes (Michaelsen 2011).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editor, Alex Michalos and the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. Olga Shemyakina thanks Georgia Institute of Technology for financial support. Anke Plagnol is grateful for financial support from the Leverhulme Trust through an Early Career Fellowship and the Isaac Newton Trust, Cambridge. We are grateful to Richard A. Easterlin, Camelia Minoiu and conference participants at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Comparative Economics (Chicago, January 2012) and at the Workshop on the Behavioral and Cultural Foundations and Consequences of Violence organized by the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN) and the Institute of Social Sciences (Lisbon, June 2010) for helpful comments and discussions. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of granting and funding agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Olga N. Shemyakina

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Anke C. Plagnol

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  1. Olga N. Shemyakina
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Correspondence to Olga N. Shemyakina.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 7 and 8.

Table 7 Summary statistics, WVS 1998 and 2001
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Table 8 Summary Statistics, Living in BiH, 2002, 2003 and 2004 waves
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Shemyakina, O.N., Plagnol, A.C. Subjective Well-Being and Armed Conflict: Evidence from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Soc Indic Res 113, 1129–1152 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0131-8

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