The tempest: Using a natural disaster to evaluate the link between wealth and child development

Abstract

How does family wealth affect children's development in the short- and long-run? We address this question by exploiting a shock occurred to family’s real estate, i.e. housing damages caused by a super typhoon. Our identification strategy is based on a comparison of children, who all lived in the same local area and thus were confronted with the same macro-economic shock, but only some experienced housing damages. We present evidence in favor of housing damages being essentially a severe wealth shock, with no effects on other observable channels which might directly harm children’s development. The shock results in a decline of educa-tional investments, but not of health-related investments. We observe a deterioration of chil-dren’s educational achievements in the short-run and even more pronounced in the long-run. Our findings are mainly driven by children whose families are at the bottom of the wealth distribution or lack the support of a strong family network.Child development, wealth effects, natural disaster