Refugee Cascades and the Spatial Spillover of Fleeing in Civil Wars
Benjamin Laughlin
University of Rochester
Abstract:
Refugee crises repeatedly surprise the international community with their size and suddenness, yet we know little about what drives them. I develop a theory of refugee crises in which civilians living in conflict zones make individual decisions to flee in response to new information about the risk of victimization in war. The information conveyed by observing refugees fleeing can result in an information cascade, in which waves of refugees fleeing cause other civilians to increase their beliefs about the risk, increasing the numbers of subsequent refugees. To test this theory, I construct a geocoded village-day level dataset of refugee flows, violence against civilians, and the actions of armed groups during the Kosovo war. I develop an instrumental variables estimation strategy using the spatial network of villages connected by roads and the fact that refugees fled toward a single border crossing to estimate the causal spillover effect of refugees fleeing. I find that on average a refugee fleeing causes more than one additional civilian to flee, which is larger than the effect of violence, the dominant explanation for refugee movements in the literature.
Discussants:
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch - University of Essex
David Davis - Emory University
Prakash Adhikari - Central Michigan University
Olga Chyzh - Iowa State University
OPSC Coordinator
Emily Ritter - University of California Merced
Graduate Assistant:
Peter D. Carey II (University of California Merced)
