The Impact of Terror Attacks on Birth Rates in Israel from 2000-2005

Guy Stecklov, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

War and crises have long been studied to shed light on the demographic consequences of conflict and stress. Essentially, the basic framework underlying existing evidence relies on a single before-after experiment. In this paper, we build upon the unique situation of Israel where we have both highly detailed, daily data on birth counts and over 100 terror attacks repeated over the period 2000-2005. Our hypotheses focus on whether an effect is identifiable and in what direction. We make use of data both on the overall number of births and the sex ratios of birth to tease out the separate effects of terror on the number of conceptions and the effect on fetal mortality.