Giulia Ferrero

Working papers

Shaping Women’s Roles: How Wartime Narratives impact Gender Norms
JMP
Sons of War: the Effect of Conflict on Son Preference
(with Jessica Mancuso)
_{Armenia and Azerbaijan, engaged in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, are known for their strong son preference and widespread use of abortion. In such a peculiar setting, we ask: does ethnic conflict affect son preference? Our study leverages variations in geographic and temporal exposure to conflict-related violence in the context of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988–1994), alongside variations in the gender composition of children between families. We combine the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) geo-referenced data on conflict-related fatalities and a digitized memoir on Armenian casualties with the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) dataset for Armenia and Azerbaijan. On top of this, we augment our analysis with a novel dataset. We digitized a memoir compiled by the Armenian Government that lists the Armenian soldiers died during the conflict during the First Nagorno Karabakh War on the Armenian front. By merging the different datasets we assign exposure to all the individuals in the DHS dataset, enabling us to test the impact of conflict on son preference through a natural experiment. Preliminary results indicate that conflict intensifies son preference in the very short run.}