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Abstract
Economic shocks at birth have lasting effects on children's health several years after the shock. The authors calculate height for age z-scores for children under age five using data from a Rwandan nationally representative household survey conducted in 1992. They exploit district and time variation in crop failure and civil conflict to measure the impact of exogenous shocks that children experience at birth on their height several years later. They find that boys and girls born after the shock in regions experiencing civil conflict are both negatively affected with height for age z-scores 0.30 and 0.72 standard deviations lower, respectively. Conversely, only girls are negatively affected by crop failure, with these girls exhibiting 0.41 standard deviation lower height for age z-scores and the impact is worse for girls in poor households. Results are robust to using sibling difference estimators, household level production, and rainfall shocks as alternative measures of crop failure.
Highlights
There is growing concern among economists and practitioners that economic conditions prevailing in early childhood may have a persistent effect on child health and socioeconomic outcomes later in life
In the simplest specification, we estimate the following regression: HAZ ijt = α j + β1 (ShockRegion j * BornAfterShock t) + δ t + ε ijt where HAZijt is the height for age z-score for child i in region j who was born in time period t, α j are the province fixed effects, δ t are the cohort of birth fixed effects, ShockRegion j * BornAfterShock t indicates children born in a region that experienced a crop failure or civil war after the economic shock occurred, and εijt is a random, idiosyncratic error term
Using nationally representative household survey data collected in January 1992 in Rwanda, we exploit variation in the timing and location of localized crop failure and civil conflict across regions of the country and variation in the birth cohort of children who are exposed to the shock
Summary
There is growing concern among economists and practitioners that economic conditions prevailing in early childhood may have a persistent effect on child health and socioeconomic outcomes later in life. Calculating the difference-in-differences estimator shows that children born after 1990 in the civil war region have 0.421 standard deviations lower height for age z-scores compared to children in the rest of the country, a result that is significant at the one percent level. The differencein-differences result indicates that children born after October 1988 in the crop failure region have 0.323 standard deviations lower height for age z-scores than children in the rest of the country, but the difference is not statistically significant. It is evident that children in the civil war regions born after the conflict started experience a significant negative drop in height for age z-scores, which is consistent with the difference-in-differences results in Table 2.10 Figure 3 compares children in the crop failure regions with children in the rest of the country. We observe that for children born after October 1988, there is a slight drop in height for age z-scores among children in the crop failure region but not in the rest of the country and in results not shown, this impact is larger for women
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