 Today I'm going to talk about this piece of research that I've been carrying out with this fantastic group of colleagues, Vincenzo, Jessica and Roberto, and the study is trying to assess the impact of peacekeeping mission on reproductive behavior. I mean, we know from the literature that, you know, armoured conflict or exposure to violence have important implications for long-term decisions, including fertility rates. There is extant research showing that, you know, fertility rates are important also for long-term outcomes and long-term development, because they can, you know, can exacerbate, higher fertility rates can exacerbate population growth or environmental threats. It can also pose health risks. And there is also evidence that is, you know, are associated with low education and poor economic growth. There is, again, from the literature, you know, very large evidence showing the impact of conflict on fertility rates. And what we, you know, we know so far is that we might have some sort of negative or positive, you know, effect. And, you know, basically we should expect to have a positive effect of conflict, so, you know, increasing fertility rates, because in that particular, you know, conflict area, women are shared the same characteristics as the, you know, population that are associated with the higher fertility rates. So what I'm talking about is that, you know, you have, you might have women, you know, with low educational background, with low educational level, sorry, they use low contraception use because there is no lack of health services, but also there is the desire to replace children lost to conflict. On the other hand, we also have some other strength over the literature showing that conflict affect negatively the fertility rate, and this is basically because individuals tend to postpone childbearing in the, you know, expectation of better times. So there's a sort of quality quantity trade-off, right? Now, given that conflict assured lived in general, and they are followed by a prolonged period of peace, I think it's going to be very interesting to see how, you know, the dynamics of fertility rates varies in, you know, during peace, and especially when, you know, conflict is settled, and then there is, you know, a peace is being kept by, for instance, UN peacekeeping operation. So there is also, you know, sorts of evidence showing that peacekeeping, besides the impact of reducing violence in ongoing wars and reducing the probability of conflict recurrence, has also important social and economic implication. In a recent paper of mine, we show that it improves household well-being, and basically because by, you know, providing security, you know, peacekeeping can try to revitalize the economic activities so that increased, you know, consumption and also increased labor market participation. There is also, you know, evidence that peacekeeping affects maternal health by increasing maternal health and also women access to service and education. In this paper, we actually are going to, as I said, to look at the impact of peacekeeping on fertility rate, and we are going to focus on a particular case, which is the Liberia. Why we choose the Liberia? Actually this is, to be honest, is sort of a pilot project, so the idea is to scale up to all relevant African countries or relevant UN peacekeeping mission. But we start from Liberia, because Liberia is one case where, you know, we have, you know, peacekeeping operation lasting from 15 years, and, you know, the sort of operation that has been, you know, labeled as such as successful. And also because Liberia has one of the highest fertility rates. And then in order to address the research question, we use data from the DHS survey, so the demographic and health survey from the three different waves, 2007, 2013 and 2019. And then, I mean, I will be more precise on this in a bit. The main outcome variable, so the dependent variable we are looking at, are the likelihood to have a child and also the number of children. Liberia, Liberia is also important because the, you know, peacekeeping operation, the mandate of the peacekeeping mission in Liberia was not only to, you know, provide security, but also to trying to assist, you know, locals and, you know, making a partnership with local organization and international organization in order to improve, you know, condition of local population. So in a sense, you know, they lay the groundwork, the groundwork for, you know, the provision of public goods, including medical services. So as I was saying, I mean, we use three rounds of the Liberian DHS. And then from that, data sources, we construct the full birth histories of women so that we are able to trace all children, women have ever given birth in the years before and after the UN arrival. We use, we couple this information with geo-coded information of peacekeeping location thanks to this fantastic paper from SEAL and co-authors that, you know, they geolocate the UN peacekeeping peacekeeper in a number of different countries. And so what we do basically is to combine the information from the geolocal, you know, the information on the locality of peacekeepers with the locality of district or villages where the survey was run in order to construct our, you know, treatment if you want or exposure, exposure variable, which is basically, you know, the exact exposure to peacekeeping base. And then given that during the period we are looking at, you know, the mission moved across country, we are also able to track, you know, precisely the movement of these peacekeepers. I mean, this is just a map of Liberia. And then what is shown here is that you have the black dots, which are the locality of peacekeeping base. And then there are some, you know, dashed yellow lines, which are the road networks. Why I'm showing this? Because instead of, you know, constructing our exposure variable in terms of cluster, I mean, the cluster that the DHS provide, I mean, we construct a more precise measure of exposure, which is based on the road distance, okay? So basically what we are able to do is to exactly, you know, measure the length between the women's survey and so interviewed and then the PK base. And there is one advantage of using this method instead of just, you know, selecting the DHS cluster is that it might be, if you look at the right hand side of these slides, it might be that, you know, if we were to consider just the cluster, we would omit the information of women that are equally distanced from the base but are outside the cluster. So in a sense, this is sort of improvement on the treatment variable. And then, I mean, these are the main results. I'm going to show you all the results we produce, but these are the results that are also robust to a number of, you know, sensitivity checks. What we found is that where UN troops are deployed, we have the likelihood of having a child drops by 5 percentage points, which, you know, amounts to 6% of the mean. Then the second result is on the number of children. And so we find that the total number of children per woman declines by 25%, which is equal to the 30% of the mean. And also we find some important heterogeneity, especially in particular, we find that these effects are more pronounced, sorry, the effect of the number of children are more pronounced on older cohorts, which makes sense, on women with higher parity level. So it means that they have more than one child and also on married women. And we're trying to provide an explanation from these results, okay? And these are basically the, you know, sort of mechanism that we are able to test in this paper. Actually, I would say that these are suggestive evidence. It's just correlation of a number of indicators with the peacekeeping exposure. And then we consider two main channels, which are, you know, the improvement in maternal health and child children outcomes. If you want, this is, you know, it's square within the quantity, quality tradeoff, which is measured by this indicator here, the number of maternal visits, the absorption of iron during pregnancy, the birth weight, the number of postnatal checks, the number of children dead under five, dead under five, and then, you know, delivery at all more, if you want, at the hospital. And then the second channel is on the opportunity cost. So the opportunity cost of raising children. And then we're trying to measure the second channel by the, you know, an indicator that we show there. Then what we find is that there is evidence, or if you want suggestive evidence on the first channel, so on the quality quantity tradeoff, then you can see the arrow means this positive effect on exposure to peacekeeping to this number of indicator, while on the opportunity cost channel, we only find significant effect on the contraception use. So basically, what is the implication of all of that? Very briefly, that peacekeeping deployment, in addition to, you know, improving local security, I'm done, can support better and more informed family planning. So by increasing, you know, the maternal health and child, children health, but also, you know, trying to plan better the, you know, the family. Yeah. And that's all from me. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.