Violent conflict, interventions, and behaviour: incentivised experiments in refugee settlements

The thesis presents three essays that explore associations among exposure to civil conflict violence, post-conflict socioeconomic interventions, and prosocial and economic behaviour in South Sudanese refugee resettlements in Northern Uganda. The key contributions of all three essays are micro-level investigations of the lasting legacies of the South Sudan civil war, focusing on the behaviour of conflict survivors across three dimensions: prosocial choice and reciprocal behaviour, risk preferences, and intrahousehold bargaining after survivor participation in a gendered socioeconomic intervention. The empirical approach adopted for data collection in the first two essays consisted of lab-in-the-field experiments and post-experiment surveys. The experiment in the first essay was a modified trust game that compared trust and reciprocity preferences between refugees in the settlements and non-refugees in the host community to examine associations between exposure to war-related violence and prosocial behaviour. In the second essay, the lab-in-the-field experiment was a modified lottery game that elicited intrahousehold gendered risk preferences and further evaluated associations between exposure to violence during the conflict and the elicited risk preferences of household agents. The empirical approach used to collect data in the third essay was a standardised intrahousehold bargaining survey, adapted to our study context, to explore associations between conflict survivor wives’ participation in a gendered socioeconomic intervention and their claimed agency in intrahousehold decision-making within patriarchal households. The key findings of the first essay were consistently higher levels of trust and reciprocity in the refugee settlement, compared to the integrated host community, as well as varying levels of sensitivity to norm violations and reinforcements; with the refugee settlement revealing a higher relative sensitivity to rewards for norms-reinforcing behaviour, and the host community revealing a higher sensitivity to punishment for norms-violating behaviour. The key findings of the second essay were positive support for increasing counter-consensus evidence of risk-seeking behaviour in women, relative to men, as found in the literature, as well as a revealed positive association between exposure to violence and risk seeking behaviour in wives, with a converse negative association between exposure to violence and risk-seeking behaviour in husbands. The key finding of the third essay was a significant association between wife participation in a gendered socioeconomic intervention and the expansion in claimed agency of decision-making by participant wives, compared to non-participant wives, in key household decision domains culturally reserved for husbands – suggesting that wife participation in the intervention increased their bargaining power in the household.