UCLA

My dissertation studies the determinants of conflict and state formation as well as how national identities influence individuals' decisions. It consists of three chapters. The first, ``Chasing the Key Player: A Network Approach to the Myanmar Civil War'' studies the determinants of civil conflict in Myanmar. As governments in weak states often face several armed groups, they have to allocate resources to fight a subset of them strategically. I use a simple model to embed heterogeneity among rebel groups stemming from their network of alliances and enmities. The key insight is that, by attacking a group, the Myanmar army weakens its allies. Therefore, the model predicts that the Myanmar army strategically targets armed groups who are central in the network of alliances. To test the model's predictions, I collect a new data set on rebel groups' locations, alliances, and enmities for the period 1989-2015. Using geo-referenced information on armed groups attacked by the Myanmar army, the empirical evidence strongly supports the predictions of the model. A one standard deviation increase in a group's centrality increases the likelihood of conflict with the Myanmar's army by twenty percent over the baseline yearly conflict probability, thus identifying a new determinant of conflict. This result is robust to variables measuring the opportunity cost of conflict such as rainfall and commodity price shocks. Since past (and expected) conflicts might affect alliances and enmities between armed groups, I pursue an instrumental variable strategy to provide evidence that the mechanism proposed is indeed causal.

The second chapter, ``Peaceful and Violent Power Consolidation: Evidence from Myanmar'' analyzes how rebels' characteristics affect the Myanmar government's choice of weakening them peacefully or through military conflict from 1988 until 2015. In line with the theoretical predictions of Powell​ ​(2013), I find empirical evidence that heterogeneity in armed groups' resources and military ability affect the Myanmar government's consolidation decisions. Namely, groups whose ethnic homeland lacks resources and/or are unable to resist sustained offensives because of their limited military capacity, are more likely to be peacefully absorbed by the Myanmar government. Moreover, peaceful consolidation takes time: only three armed groups out of the forty-seven active in 1988 can be said to be completely disarmed by 2015 while almost twenty of them keep playing a role as militias linked to the Myanmar government.

In the third and last chapter, I study the cultural transmission of fertility preferences among second generation immigrant women observed in U.S. Censuses from 1910 to 1970. As hypothesized by Bisin & Verdier(2001), the transmission of preferences can be ``vertical'' or ``horizontal''. Using a unique source documenting the variation in fertility behavior in Europe before and after the first demographic transition (1830-1970), I unpack the influence of parents (measured by source-country fertility at the time of departure from Europe) versus the influence of peers (measured by fertility of the same-age cohorts living in the source country and transmitted by same-age recent immigrants). I find that the transmission mechanism is crucially affected by the number of foreign-born immigrant peers living in the same MSA. On one hand, the ``vertical'' channel of transmission is stronger in places where there are few newly-arrived foreign born immigrant couples from the same source countries. On the other hand, fertility choices of second generation women are strongly correlated with marital fertility choices measured over peer cohorts in the source countries whenever they live in MSAs densely populated by recently arrived immigrants.