The seasonality of conflict

Abstract

This paper uses one of the largest changes to labor demand in developing countries—harvest—to examine how the returns to fighting vs. working impact the intensity of conflict. Exploiting the exogenous allocation and timing of harvest across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, we find that the onset of harvest reduces the number of insurgent attacks by between 6 and 21%. This is not due to changes in local temperature or rainfall, to name a few possibilities. Moreover, because harvest is transitory and anticipated, our estimates minimize the potential bias present in other persistent income shocks commonly used in the literature.