Violent Conflict and Academic Research: Evidence from the 2014 Conflict in Ukraine

Talk by Maksym Obrizan (Kyiv School of Economics) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

We estimate the effects of the 2014 Russian military intervention in Ukraine on scientists and their research. We use a difference-in-differences event study framework to quantify the war's effects on research productivity, mobility, and collaborations. Using publication data from the SCOPUS database, we create a panel of authors affiliated with Ukrainian universities and research centers before and after the beginning of the intervention. Our treatment group includes researchers from the heavily impacted regions of Donbas and Crimea in 2012-2013, just prior to the start of the conflict. Our control group are scientists from other regions of Ukraine at this time who were not directly affected by the conflict. We find that publications for authors in the affected regions (Donbas/Crimea) declined compared to authors in other Ukrainian regions, particularly for men. We also show that co-authorship with Russian scientists increased in the affected regions after the onset of the conflict. By focusing on academics – key agents in the generation and diffusion of knowledge – our findings offer a unique perspective on labor market disruptions induced by war. Our results can be scaled up to approximate the cost of the full-scale Russian aggression in 2022, data for which will become available only in a few years.