Health Consequences of the War in Eastern Ukraine: Comparing 2015-16 to 2012-13

Previous literature identifies significant negative consequences of violent conflict on population health. Using a unique data set of 36,024 district-level observations for main disease groups spanning 2012-2016, we test whether this finding carries over to a military conflict in Eastern Ukraine before the full-scale Russian invasion on February 24th, 2022. The difference-in-difference methodology used in this paper shows no statistically significant effect on population health in war-affected regions of Donbas for the majority of disease classes, including those identified in the previous literature. These insignificant results are surprising because they contradict substantial recent evidence on the negative socio-economic effect of the conflict in Donbas on happiness, political participation, and employment.