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Impact of terrorism on child sex at birth: evidence from Pakistan

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Abstract

Using insights from the literature on psychology and medicine, we examine the impact of stress induced by terrorism on child sex at birth. The psychological and social stressors associated with terrorist events prior to conception may trigger changes in parental hormones that have an implication for birth outcomes. We extract data on 11,331 live births conceived between 2007 and 2012 from Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2012–2013 and match these data with household information, monthly terrorist incidents at home district, and other district-level characteristics. Our analysis shows that parental exposure to terrorism prior to conception reduces the likelihood of a male birth. We examine the birth outcome of siblings by exploiting the variation in exposure to terrorism across pregnancies for a given mother and confirm our finding. The results provide microeconomic evidence of the potential long-term impact of terrorism on population dynamics and development.

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Notes

  1. Lee (2014) finds that cohort of children born to mothers exposed to the trauma caused by the Korean War (1950–1953) had much worse levels of health, education, and labor market outcomes during their lifetime. Interestingly, women's health outcomes were unaffected by the war, whereas men born in the 1950 saw higher rates of disability and mortality at older ages.

  2. Valente (2015) focuses on exposure to conflict. She does not find a statistically significant relationship between conflict and the neonatal mortality or child size at birth.

  3. Studies on the Mexican Drug Wars (Brown 2018) and homicides in Brazil (Koppensteiner and Manacorda 2016) reveal that in-utero exposure to these disturbances in the residence areas of mothers leads to a substantial decrease in the birthweight of newborn. Employing heterogeneous analysis, both studies find that the low birthweight effect is more prominent in children of mothers with low levels of education. This implies that violence exacerbates the disadvantage that these children experience as a result of the lower socioeconomic status of their households.

  4. This body of literature is large (e.g., Abadie and Gardeazabal 2003, 2008; Arce 2018; Bandyopadhyay, Sandler, and Younas 2018, 2014; Chesney, Reshetar, and Karaman 2011; Drakos and Kutan 2003, Gaibulloev and Sandler 2008, 2009, 2011; Gaibulloev, Sandler, and Sul 2014, Younas 2015). See Gaibulloev and Sandler (2019) for a recent comprehensive review of terrorism literature.

  5. Sen (1990) provides a shocking analysis that fomented a large body of research on gender bias against women. He pointed out that 100 million missing girls should have been born, but they simply never existed likely due to the strong preference for boys and abortion of female fetuses.

  6. Evidence from the great East Japan earthquake of 2011 shows that stress may increase the rate of male fetal losses in utero and also reduce the odds of male conception (Catalano, Yorifuji and Kawachi 2013).

  7. Primary sex ratio refers to the ratio of males to females at the time of conception, when the sperm fertilizes the egg, and secondary sex ratio refers to the male-to-female ratio at the time of childbirth.

  8. The reason is that cervical mucus viscosity varies across the cycle with being thick immediately before and after ovulation, thus giving advantage to smaller and shorter Y-bearing sperm to reach and fuse with an egg (Jongbloet et al. 2001).

  9. The National Institute of Population Studies (NIPS) conducted the survey under the guidance of the Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations and Coordination of Pakistan. Sampling is based on a stratified two-stage cluster sampling procedure. The population is stratified into urban and rural area frames. At the first stage, clusters of about 200 to 250 households are identified within each sampling frame, and 498 clusters in total are selected to represent the population of the four provinces of Pakistan and Gilgit Baltistan region. The sample excludes Azad Jammu and Kashmir, FATA, and restricted military and protected areas. At the second stage, 28 households are randomly chosen for interviews from each cluster by applying a systematic sampling technique with a random start.

  10. We exclude all events that are coded as terrorism. The aggregate (non-terror) political violence—in addition to violences captured in the five listed variables—includes threat of violence and other types of violence that are not easily categorized.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE

    Khusrav Gaibulloev & Javed Younas

  2. Dallas, TX, USA

    Gerel Oyun

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  1. Khusrav Gaibulloev
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Appendix

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Table 4 The effect of terrorism on probability of male birth: alternative measures of terrorism
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Table 5 The effect of terrorism on probability of male birth: logit models
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Table 6 Descriptive statistics of variables: a sample of mothers who had multiple births over the sample period
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Table 7 The effect of terrorism on probability of male birth: panel regressions with parents fixed effects using alternative measures of terrorism
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Table 8 The effect of terrorism on probability of male birth: panel regressions with parents fixed effects for the sample of parents married for the first time
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Table 9 The effect of terrorism on probability of male birth: panel regressions with parents fixed effects using various types of political violence
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Gaibulloev, K., Oyun, G. & Younas, J. Impact of terrorism on child sex at birth: evidence from Pakistan. Empir Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-024-02605-z

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