Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The objective of this paper is to estimate the effect of civil conflict on student achievement gains in standardized examinations. By considering students who have been exposed to a conflict environment and students who have not been exposed to a conflict environment, we want to find out whether Colombian students affected by conflict have differential gains or losses in performance in comparison to those students who have not been affected, using the results from the Colombian high school exit examination (Saber11) and the Colombian college exit examination (SaberPro). To the best of my knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the relationship between civil conflict and academic achievement measured by cognitive examinations at both high school and university levels. To tackle this research question we use the theoretical framework employed in educational value added models. Following this theoretical backbone, we apply a difference in differences estimation strategy in order to quantify the student’s learning gains using information at two points in time. Our results show that Colombian students who had been affected by conflict tend to have greater gains in performance in comparison to those students who have not been affected. This finding was robust to the different measures of conflict (intensity and presence) that we used.