Civil Conflict and Education: How Does Exposure to Civil Conflict Affect Human Capital Accumulation? Evidence from Standardized Exit Exams in Colombia.

A civil conflict has significant economic, social and political repercussions that could potentially affect the educational achievement of individuals. Nevertheless, this important issue has been insufficiently addressed in the literature. The purpose of this research project is to explore the relationship between civil conflict and educational achievement in Colombia through the use of multilevel analysis. Multilevel analysis will be employed in this research project in order to deal adequately with the hierarchical structure of the data by simultaneously modeling variables at different levels without resorting to aggregation or disaggregation of the dataset. Taking advantage of a unique database administered by a Colombian think tank (Resource Centre for Conflict Analysis - CERAC) that contains records of civil conflict events in Colombia, a government kept database containing the results of standardized tests at different levels of schooling, and additional information about schools and teachers from the National Department of Statistics of Colombia (DANE), we are going to construct a multilevel model to further investigate the relationship between civil conflict and educational achievement.}