Aerial Bombardment and Educational Attainment

This paper provides evidence that the Allied bombing of Vietnam, the longest and heaviest aerial bombardment in the history, imposed detrimental effects on educational attainment of school-age individuals. By exploiting the plausibly exogenous district-by-cohort variation in bomb destruction under a difference-in-differences framework, we find that an increase in bomb intensity leads to significantly fewer educational years completed by school-age children exposed to the bombardment. A series of robustness checks, falsification tests, and the instrumental-variable strategy further support our results. The findings underline the importance of policies targeting children after wartime.