Violent conflicts have negative effects on prosperity and develop-
ment. Reconstruction efforts need that qualified labor force is willing
to work in highly violent areas. We use a field experiment to inves-
tigate the effects of life risk on sorting in the labor market. We offer
comparable jobs in low and high conflict areas in Colombia to a pool of
job seekers. We find that the applicant rate decreases in 12 percentage
points due to life risk. Yet, the drop is similar for male and female
job seekers, suggesting that if women are more risk averse than men,
the difference is not large enough to have economic impacts. A salary
increase helps to increase application rates to high risk jobs but does
not close the gap.