DC Accepted Papers Paper:
How Does a Household’s Response to Adverse Climate Events Impact Their Students’ Educational Attainment and Achievement?
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
This paper analyzes the relationship between a household’s response to a natural disaster or climate-related shock, including flooding, drought, erosion, frosts, or crop failure events, on their childrens’ future educational outcomes. With focus on the Indian context, the study looks at educational attainment and outcomes of students from shock-exposed households versus that of those from non-exposed households. Utilizing an education production function model, which includes inputs for school effects, household socioeconomic characteristics, and student factors, this analysis seeks to estimate the isolated impact of the type of household response, categorized as either an income, savings and assets, or consumption response, on years of schooling and cognitive test scores. This analysis uses survey data collected between 2002 and 2016 from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, two states in eastern India, as a part of the Young Lives: an International Study of Childhood Poverty project.
As most related studies estimate short-run impacts of adverse climate events, this thesis seeks to add to the literature by using panel data and a difference-in-difference methodology to isolate the lagged effect of natural disaster response on education, up to 4 years after a child is initially exposed to the shock. This approach measures changes in test scores over time for exposed and non-exposed children, with specific focus on children who did not experience a shock early on, but did later on. Along with controlling for relevant covariates and categorizing children by response type, this method provides insight on if and how the type of household response to shock exposure impacts educational outcomes.
