Lecture: Civil War in Nepal

Lecture by Michael Gilligan, an associate professor of politics at New York University, in Social Sciences Building room 107. Gilligan uses behavioral games and original survey data from Nepal to study how a community's exposure to violent conflict affects its stock of social capital. He found that communities with greater exposure to violence during Nepal's ten-year civil war exhibit significantly greater levels of social capital. Gilligan?s identification strategy, which exploits communities' exogenous isolation from the war due to Nepal's rugged terrain, suggests that this effect of conflict exposure is probably causal. A second contribution concerns the possible causal mechanisms for this relationship. Previous work has suggested a causal mechanism for this relationship at the level of individual preferences. Gilligan by contrast takes a community-level approach arguing that communities that suffered war-related violence were forced to adopt new institutions that fostered pro-social behavior. He performed a test between these two possible causal mechanisms and find support for both, although the two mechanisms appear to operate on different components of social. Gilligan much less confident in the results for the preference-based hypothesis because of potential selection bias, measurement error and the relatively small number of households were violently affected by the war. His findings for a community-based mechanism bear none of these problems.

Admission: FREE Registration:

Thursday, Oct. 14, 12:30 PM

For more information, please call: (858) 822-5296