About

Olga Shemyakina is a professor affiliated with the School of Economics at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the economic impacts of armed conflict, including its effects on education, health, labor markets, and household welfare. She has contributed to understanding how conflict influences human capital accumulation, household victimization, food insecurity, and subjective well-being, with specific studies on regions such as Tajikistan, Côte d'Ivoire, Zimbabwe, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her work often explores gender-differential effects of terrorism, the impact of conflict exposure during formative years, and the role of remittances and transfers as coping strategies in conflict zones.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economics
• Medicine
• Development economics
• Psychology
• Environmental health
• Socioeconomics
• Geography
• Political economy
• Immunology
• Economic growth
• Demography
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Growing up amid armed conflict: Women's attitudes toward domestic violence

  Journal of Comparative Economics · 2024-05-28 · 12 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• War, Conflict, and Food Insecurity

  Annual Review of Resource Economics · 2022 · 52 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Development economics

  This article reviews the literature at the intersection of war, armed conflict, and food security, focusing on intergroup violent conflicts such as interstate conflict, civil war, insurgencies, state violence toward civilians, riots, and nonstate conflict. We briefly discuss recent trends in conflict and food security and note the channels through which conflict may impact food security in developing countries. Next, we review the quantitative literature, studying the pathways between conflict and food security and their effects on child health and household coping strategies, displacement, changes in factors of production, market and travel restrictions, and insurgent predation. The effect of food insecurity on conflict, related to limited access to land and shocks to commodity prices, is discussed. We briefly survey the effects of aid and assistance programs and then discuss the connection between climate change, conflict, and food security. The review concludes by identifying topics in this field that are ripe for future research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: Land Reform and Child Health in the Kyrgyz Republic

  Harvard Dataverse · 2022-02-08

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Replication file for Figures and Tables in Paper and Appendix: Kosec, Katrina and Olga Shemyakina. 2022. “Child Health and Land Reform in Kyrgyzstan". (Katrina Kosec, International Food Policy Research Institute, k.kosec@cgiar.org; Olga Shemyakina, School of Economics, Georgia Institute of Technology, olga.shemyakina@econ.gatech.edu).

  PublisherDOI

• Land Reform and Child Health in the Kyrgyz Republic

  Economic Development and Cultural Change · 2022-04-08 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Can the establishment of private property rights to land improve child health and nutrition outcomes? We exploit a natural experiment in the Kyrgyz Republic following the collapse of socialism, whereby the government rapidly liquidated state and collective farms containing 75% of agricultural land and distributed it to individuals, providing 99-year transferable use rights. We use household surveys collected before, during, and after the privatization reform and spatial variation in its timing to identify its health and nutrition impacts. We find that young children aged 0–5 exposed to land privatization for longer periods of time accumulated significantly greater gains in height- and weight-for-age z-scores, both critical measures of long-term child health and nutrition. Health improvements appear to be driven by increases in consumption of home-produced food rather than increased income from sale of production, likely due to underdeveloped markets. We find minimal impacts on urban-dwelling children affected only indirectly by the reform.

  PublisherDOI

• Political violence and child health: Results from Zimbabwe

  Economics & Human Biology · 2021 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Geography
  PublisherDOI

• Public Health and Armed Conflict: Immunization in Times of Systemic Disruptions

  Population and Development Review · 2021 · 22 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Environmental health

  Abstract Armed conflicts are a concern for human development and public health and represent a major impediment for realizing Sustainable Development Goal #3: to ensure healthy lives and promote well‐being for all at all ages. Vaccination programs can be highly politicized and subjected to major security constraints in war zones, reducing their effectiveness. This article studies how armed conflict impacts immunization rates among children, combining two large datasets. We use health data for 15 conflict‐affected countries in sub‐Saharan Africa, including multiple Demographic and Health Survey rounds for most. We exploit the fact that age‐appropriate vaccinations should take place in the child's first year of life and compare children aged one to five with varying degrees of (local) conflict exposure in their first year of life within the same countries and communities. We differentiate between the effects of local and country‐level exposure to conflict on childhood immunization rates. The regression results show that conflict has a nonmonotonic effect on vaccination rates with minor (major) conflicts being associated with higher (lower) full immunization rates. We argue that in the case of minor conflicts, local‐level health care access drives the results, whereas for major conflicts it is mainly national channels that drive the result.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Русская культура как текст: диалоги со временем в творчестве Андрея Платонова и Венедикта Ерофеева

  2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

• Land reform and child health in the Kyrgyz Republic

  2019-01-01 · 4 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Does the establishment of private property rights to land improve child health and nutrition outcomes? We exploit a natural experiment in the Kyrgyz Republic following the collapse of socialism, whereby the government rapidly liquidated state and collective farms containing 75 percent of agricultural land and distributed it to individuals, providing 99-year transferrable use rights. We use household surveys collected before, during, and after the privatization reform and spatial variation in its timing to identify its health and nutrition impacts. We find that young children aged 0-5 exposed to land privatization for longer periods of time accumulated significantly greater gains in height and weight, both critical measures of long-term health and nutrition. Health improvements appear to be driven by increases in consumption of home-produced food—suggesting that increased private control over household production may translate into increased consumption and thus health dividends for young children.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Land Reform and Child Health in The Kyrgyz Republic

  AgEcon Search (University of Minnesota, USA) · 2018-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Does privatizing land improve child health and nutrition outcomes? We exploit a natural experiment in The Kyrgyz Republic following the collapse of socialism whereby the government rapidly liquidated state and collective farms containing 75 percent of agricultural land and distributed it to individuals, providing 99-year transferrable use rights. We use household surveys collected before, during, and after the reform and data on the spatial variation in the timing of privatization to identify its health and nutrition impacts. We find that children exposed to land privatization for longer periods of time accumulated significantly greater gains in height and weight, both critical measures of long-term health and nutrition. Children who benefited most from privatization were between the ages of 1 and 1.5 possibly due to protective effects of breastfeeding for children younger than a year old, and reduced vulnerability to health shocks at older ages. We find no evidence of significant gender differences in the effects of privatization. Acknowledgement : We thank both the Georgia Institute of Technology and IFPRI s Central Asia Program for financial support. We are also grateful to the Life in The Kyrgyz Republic (LIKS) team for their support, which included adding questions on the timing of land reform to round 5 of that survey, explicitly for the purposes of this study. The authors may be contacted at: Katrina Kosec, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI, 2033 K Street, NW Washington, DC 20006, USA, , (323) 229 3180.

  PublisherDOI

• Domestic Violence and Childhood Exposure to Armed Conflict: Attitudes and Experiences

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2017-08-01 · 8 citations

  preprintSenior author

  We examine the effect of exposure to armed conflict in childhood and youth on women and men’s attitudes toward domestic violence in Sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, our study identifies age periods during childhood that are most critical for the formation of beliefs on domestic violence as well as mechanisms underlying these effects. We merge individual data on the attitudes of 438, 000 women and 172, 000 men who were interviewed between 2001 and 2015 in 20 Sub-Saharan African countries with geo-coded data on all armed conflicts in the region between 1946 and 2006. Our identification strategy exploits geographic variation in conflict intensity across sub-national regions and temporal variation in exposure to conflict events across birth cohorts. Men and women who were exposed to conflict between ages 6 and 10 appear to be the most vulnerable to internalizing surrounding violence and expressing more acceptance of domestic violence. Women who experienced conflict during this age were also more likely to report being a victim of domestic violence. We explore several mechanisms and observe that reduced educational attainment is one plausible channel through which childhood exposure to conflict affected women’s acceptance of domestic violence later in life.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Patrícia Justino

  United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research

  5 shared

• Camelia Minoiu

  Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

  5 shared

• Д.Ю. Гущина

  4 shared

• Prakarsh Singh

  3 shared

• Katrina Kosec

  3 shared

• Mayra Buvinić

  Center for Global Development

  2 shared

• Mónica Das Gupta

  2 shared

• Giulia La Mattina

  University of South Florida

  2 shared

Labs

• Olga Shemyakina's LabPI

Awards & honors

• Jefferson Science Fellowship (2024–2025)