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  5. The Legacy of War on Preferences, Perceptions and Beliefs
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The Legacy of War on Preferences, Perceptions and Beliefs

Paper Session

Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (PST)

Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Union Square 15 and 16
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Niklas Buehren, World Bank

Legacies of Conflict: Self-efficacy and the Formation of Conditional Trust

Niklas Buehren
,
World Bank
Markus Goldstein
,
World Bank
Imran Rasul
,
University College London
Andrea Smurra
,
University College London

Abstract

Exposure to armed conflict in early life is a traumatic experience, affecting 400 million children worldwide. We combine theory, measurement, and evidence to study how psychological legacies of conflict mediate the relationship between exposure to conflict and the long-run formation of trust preferences. Our analysis is based on a sample of 4,200 women born during the Sierra Leonean civil war and surveyed 14 years later. We first introduce the notion of conditional trust in one-off anonymized exchange. We then develop a framework formalizing the link between exposure to conflict and trust. This makes precise what individuals have in mind when expressing conditional trust in others, and establishes the roles of post-traumatic growth and self-efficacy in linking conflict and trust. Taking the predictions to data, we show that exposure to conflict significantly increases self-efficacy, and through this channel, conflict leads conditional trust to rise and for outright trust of others to fall, relative to those never exposed to conflict. To further microfound how exposure to conflict translates into psychological legacies, we construct a granular typology of experiences of conflict, combining information on exposure to conflict, recall of victimization, and ages of exposure to conflict. We use this to show how direct exposure, memories and trauma, and narratives of conflict from others each distinctively shape self-efficacy. Finally, we show how our model and evidence can help reconcile heterogeneous findings across conflict scenarios, and suggests avenues for future work on the more general role of psychological legacies from traumatic shocks early in life on the long-run formation of economic preferences.

Political Trenches: War, Partisanship, and Polarization

Pauline Grosjean
,
University of South Wales
Saumitra Jha
,
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Michael Vlassopoulos
,
University of Southampton
Yves Zenou
,
Monash University

Abstract

We study the dynamics between local segregation, partisanship, and political polarization.
We exploit large-scale, exogenous and high-stakes peer assignment due to universal
conscription of soldiers assigned from each of 34,947 municipalities to French infantry regiments
during WWI. We find that municipalities with soldiers serving with the same line
regiment converge in their post-war voting behaviors. Soldiers from rural municipalities
exposed to more leftist regimental peers become more leftist for the first time after the
war, while adjacent municipalities assigned to the right are inoculated against the left. We
provide evidence that these differences reflect persuasive information exchanged among
peers when the stakes for cooperation and trust are high rather than group conformity.
These differences further lead to the emergence of sharp and enduring post-war discontinuities
across 435 regimental boundaries that are reflected, not only in voting, but also in
violent civil conflicts between Collaborators and Resistants during WWII.

Narratives of Civil War and Economic Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from Finland

Peter Matthews
,
Middlebury College
Topi Miettinen
,
Hanken School of Economics
Torsten Santavirta
,
University of Helsinki

Abstract

We study the legacy of the Finnish Civil War of 1918, a particularly violent armed internal conflict among the descendants of veterans. We compare self-reported outcomes for the descendants of the participants on the two sides of the conflict, such as their trust in others, their (economic) preferences as well as perceptions and beliefs about societal institutions. In particular, we explore the causal effects of stimuli related to the civil war narrative (which may have been differentially passed on to next generations on the two sides) on preferences, perceptions and beliefs.
We elicit beliefs and preferences as part of a large-scale survey which was sent out to directly linked children, grand-children, and grand-grand-children of Finnish citizens in the Longitudinal Veteran Database (LVD) of Civil War 1918. In the treatment condition, the elicitation of beliefs and preferences followed a battery of sensitive questions and statements regarding the civil war to which we expect differential answers and reactions depending on which side of the civil war the ancestor participated, according to LVD. In the control condition, the battery of sensitive questions follows the elicitation of beliefs and preferences.
We find a statistically significant effect of the stimuli treatment on trust in others whereas we do not find a statistically significant effect for any of the other primary outcomes. In subsample analyses, we find subsets of respondents, who respond to the stimuli with respect to all primary outcomes.

Discussant(s)
Torsten Santavirta
,
University of Helsinki
Niklas Buehren
,
World Bank
Saumitra Jha
,
Stanford Graduate School of Business
JEL Classifications
  • D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
  • N4 - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation