Child health impact of the Nepalese civil war

This study provides the first evidence that the Nepalese civil war (1996–2006) negatively affected the health of children by exploiting spatial and temporal variation in exposure to war‐related conflicts. Samples (14,447 children aged 5 years or younger) are extracted from the 1996, 2001, 2006 Demographic and Health Surveys. The results from mother fixed effects regression show that exposure has modest but significantly negative impacts on height of children under age 5 on the intensive margin. Conditional on average months of exposure to war violence of the study sample, the height of children decreases by 0.08 standard deviation. In particular, this negative health impact is statistically significant and similar across the whole height distribution.