Effects of Civil and Interstate Wars on Human Life Expectancy and Mortality: A Time Series Cross-National Analysis

Quan Li, Pennsylvania State University
Ming Wen, University of Utah

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of military conflict on human life expectancy and age-specific mortality across countries and over time. The paper includes two main parts. First, we develop a theoretical model of the relationship between conflict, on the one hand, and life expectancy and mortality, on the other, highlighting the role of material and psychosocial variables. Next, we test hypotheses from the theoretical model for a sample of about 120 countries from 1960 to 1999. The empirical analysis assesses both the direct and indirect effects of civil and interstate wars in terms of war expectation, duration and severity. The design is pooled time series cross sectional design. We apply a set of statistical techniques, including OLS with panel corrected standard errors, OLS with robust standard errors, fixed effects model, and the GEE models, to ensure that our results are not artifacts of particular modeling choices.