Givers of Great Dinners Know Few Enemies : The Impact of Household Food Sufficiency and Food Sharing on Low-Intensity Inter-Household and Community Conflict in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Our study establishes a linkage between household level food sufficiency and food sharing behavior with the reduction of low-intensity micro level conflict using primary data from 1763 households of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. We first examine if food sufficient households are less likely to engage in low-intensity individual and community level conflict. Following, we investigate if there are heterogeneous effects of food sufficiency on inter-household and community level conflict, conditional on food sharing. Using propensity score matching, we find that household food sufficiency reduces probability of conflict with other households and groups within the community by an average of around 10 percentage points. However, upon conditioning on food sharing behavior, we find that food sufficient households that share their food reduce their probability of conflict by 13.8 percentage points on average while the effects disappear for households who do not share their food. Our results hold through a rigorous set of robustness checks including doubly robust estimator, placebo regression, matching quality tests and Rosenbaum bounds for hidden bias. We conclude that food sufficiency reduces low-intensity inter-household and community conflict only in the presence of food sharing behavior and offer explanations and policy prescriptions through rational choice behavior of economic anthropology