Abstract

This thesis primarily focusses on studying specific research questions from human development perspective, relating to violent conflict, women’s decision making power, fertility decisions, child health, informal employment and intra-household resource allocation. The first essay underscores the importance of women’s decision making power within the households, elucidating how violent conflict such as terrorism reshapes their say in household decisions. This essay employed Difference-in Differences (DID) and reveals significant insights into the impact of exposure to violence, particularly terrorism, on women’s decision making power within households in both short run and long run. The results indicate an average increase of approximately 25% in women’s participation in decision-making, which is notably higher than previously reported magnitudes in the literature. This underscores the unique and potent effect of high intensity violence such as terrorism on women’s empowerment within households. Moreover, individual level analysis also indicates that exposure to violence significantly increases the women’s participation in various household decision making domains.

The findings of second essay indicates that quantity of children increased in the treated group but have negative impact on the quality of children of aged 0-5 years relative to control group. The results support the notion that temporary increase in the fertility decreases the quality of children in the conflict group relative to control group. The reason behind the reduced quality of children is increased competition for the available resources among the children in the household because now there are more mouths to feed. Moreover, the third essays results demonstrate that household heads who are informally employed tend to allocate a greater proportion of their overall expenditures to food expenditures compared to formal household heads. Interestingly, informal employment does not appear to have a significant effect on non-food expenditures. Furthermore, informal employment is associated with lower household education expenditures relative to formal workers. The share of health expenditure to total household expenditure is higher in the informal households than their formal counterparts. The study also highlights that households with informally employed heads are more likely to fall into the moderate or severe food insecurity category.