War and the Stock of Human Capital

We expand the literature on the costs of conflict by studying how wars affect the stock of human capital. Applying a “missing people” approach to censuses before and after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, we show that the size of the educated cohort shrunk by 39 percent. This effect contrasts with the demographic trends observed in other African countries during the same period and in Rwanda pre-genocide where the less educated are more likely to be missing. We show that excess missing rate of the educated found after the genocide is driven by deaths of educated Hutus, rather than refugee flows or even the ethnic targeting of Tutsis. We discuss how this loss affects labor markets post-conflict, the returns to education and we document the bias of studies that focus on impact of wars on the accumulation of human capital.