Job Market Paper: War and internally displaced persons in Iraq 

This paper studies how internally displaced persons reacted as a response to violent conflict in Iraq during the war against ISIL between 2014 and 2017. I develop a network model that accommodates new data with exact geographical coordinates. The data on IDPs and conflict has a large spacetime variation that can be exploited by the estimation model. I contribute to fill the existing gap in the conflict literature regarding internally displaced persons by answering the following questions: How far from conflict do IDPs go? Where do IDPs shelter? How does conflict increase the probability of a location to host IDPs? How does conflict accumulate to trigger displacement? The highest concentration of IDPs is found within 2 miles of conflict and decreases with distance, disappearing beyond 40 miles. IDPs tend to cluster in highly populated areas, within 5 miles of a main road. Non-diverse ethno-religious areas host fewer IDPs relative to areas without a clear ethno-religious majority. An extra conflict event within 2 miles increases the probability of a grid cell to host IDPs by 30%. Forced displacement is triggered by conflict accumulating for two weeks at most.