Educational achievement at schools: Assessing the effect of the civil conflict using a pseudo-panel of schools

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between civil conflict and educational achievement in Colombia through the use of pseudo-panel analysis. We construct a pseudo-panel of schools using the Colombian high school exit examination (Saber11) results from the years 2000, 2002, 2005 and 2007. The results obtained in this research provide evidence of the negative repercussions that a civil conflict can have on human capital accumulation at the school level. Results show a negative and significant relation between the intensity and presence of conflict and the levels of performance in the mathematics and language examinations.