Conflict, institutions, and economic behavior: Legacies of the Cambodian genocide

This paper explores whether the Cambodian genocide under the Pol Pot regime (1975–1979) altered people’s post-conflict behaviors through institutional changes. We compare couples who had their first child during and right after the Pol Pot era. These two couples had distinct institutional experiences: The former were controlled as family organizations – state-owned spouses and children – and the latter were not. Combining spatial genocide data and the complete count Population Census microdata, we find adverse impacts of the genocide on parents’ subsequent investments in children’s education only for the former couples. We provide suggestive evidence that this can be because people were persistently susceptible to fear of violence depending on their experiences of the institutions.