This paper investigates whether poor employment prospects of potential insurgents help to fuel conflict. The paper … benefits are unobserved. In contrast, many other shocks in the conflict literature are persistent and unanticipated, thus also … estimates of the effect of harvest shocks on conflict intensity in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan using subnational variation …

and Eastern provinces that faced the brunt of the decades-long conflict remain disproportionately poor. To understand the …