Edward Miguel * Gérard Roland **
This draft: May 2010
First draft: January 2005

Abstract: We investigate the impact of U.S. bombing on later economic development in
Vietnam. The Vietnam War featured the most intense bombing campaign in military history and
had massive humanitarian costs. We use a unique U.S. military dataset containing bombing
intensity at the district level (N=584) to assess whether the war damage led to persistent local
poverty traps. We compare the heavily bombed districts to other districts controlling for district
demographic and geographic characteristics, and use an instrumental variable approach
exploiting distance to the 17th parallel demilitarized zone. U.S. bombing does not have negative
impacts on local poverty rates, consumption levels, infrastructure, literacy or population density
through 2002. This finding indicates that even the most intense bombing in human history did
not generate local poverty traps in Vietnam.


¨We are grateful to Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF), the Defense Security
Cooperation Agency (DSCA), and the Technology Center for Bomb and Mine Disposal, Vietnam
Ministry of Defense (BOMICO) for providing access to the U.S. military data, and in particular to Major
Patrick Keane, Benjamin Reich, Michael Sheinkman, Bill Shaw, and Tom Smith. Pamela Jakiela,
Marieke Kleemans, Melissa Knox, Khuyen Nguyen, Rachel Polimeni, Monika Shah and especially Paul
Cathcart provided splendid research assistance. We are also grateful to Fred Brown, Jim Fearon, Raquel
Fernandez, Scott Gartner, Steve Helfand, Chang-Tai Hsieh, Chad Jones, Dean Karlan, David Laitin,
Adam Przeworski, Martin Ravallion, Debraj Ray, John Strauss and to numerous seminar participants at
Harvard / MIT, ECARES-ULB, the 2005 ASSA Meetings, U.C. Riverside, U.C. Berkeley, University of
British Columbia, the Pacific Development Conference, University of Michigan, Center for Global
Development, Stanford University, the MacArthur Inequality Network, BREAD-CEPR Conference,
Economic History Association Meetings, NYU, Cornell, and Yale, and two anonymous referees and the
editor (Mark Rosenzweig), for useful comments.


* Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley and NBER (email:
emiguel@econ.berkeley.edu, phone: 1-510-642-7162, fax: 1-510-642-6615)
** Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley and CEPR (email:
groland@econ.berkeley.edu, phone: 1-510-642-4321, fax: 1-510-642-6615)