Can non-disruptive wars be a positive transformative event for education?

This paper proposes that, under specific conditions, wars can shift family investments decisions toward more portable and less susceptible-to-confiscation assets, such as education. To test our theory, we examine the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a violent conflict that did not specifically disrupted family dynamics or targeted children or educational infrastructure. We compare the educational attainment of individuals exposed to the war with that of cohorts from preceding and subsequent periods. Using a regression discontinuity approach, our results reveal that individuals who reached school age during the conflict exhibited higher completion rates for both primary and secondary education. The benefits were especially pronounced for individuals whose parents were less-educated, utterly impacting the allocation of educational opportunities. These findings support a new framework for exploring educational gains in conflicts where violence is not targeted indiscriminately at entire social groups including children and the destruction of civil and educational infrastructures is relatively contained. Beyond our historical case, our framework is particularly relevant for studying contemporary, lower-intensity conflicts (excess of mortality not concentrating on children or women) that may foster long-term educational benefits across generations.