True Cost of War: The Conflict in Eastern Ukraine

Erhan Artuç; Nicolas Gomez-Parra; Harun Onder

doi:10.1162/rest.a.1737

True Cost of War: The Conflict in Eastern Ukraine

Erhan Artuç¹; Nicolas Gomez-Parra²; Harun Onder³

¹ Development Economics Research Group, World Bank, Washington, DC · ² World Bank, Washington, DC · ³ Texas A&M University, College Station, TX

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2026

This paper proposes a new method to estimate the welfare impact of conflicts and remedy common data constraints in conflict-affected environments. The method first estimates how agents regard spatial welfare differentials by voting with their feet, using pre-conflict data. Then, it infers a lower-bound estimate for the conflict-driven welfare shock from partially observed post-conflict migration patterns. Results for the conflict in Eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2019 show a large lower-bound welfare loss for Donetsk residents equivalent to 8–32 percent of lifetime income depending on agents’ time preference and risk aversion parameters.

DOI: 10.1162/rest.a.1737
Pages: 1-30
Language: en
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Sources: crossref openalex