Tropical Cyclones and Fertility : New Evidence from Madagascar

Abstract

Does exposure to tropical cyclones affect fertility? This paper tackles this issue byexploiting geolocated microdata from the Malagasy Demographic and Health Surveytogether with wind field data generated by tropical cyclones hitting Madagascar duringthe 1985-2009 period. The mothers’ fertility history available in the microdata allowsus to construct a panel dataset indicating if a mother gave birth during a given yearand if she has been exposed to a tropical cyclone. By means of panel regressions, thatallows a full control of unobserved heterogeneities, we then estimate the causal effect oftropical cyclone shocks on female likelihood of giving birth. We find evidence that theeffect of tropical cyclone exposure on motherhood is significantly negative. In particular,being exposed to wind speed of 100 km/h implies a fall in the probability of giving birthof 25.6 points in the current year together with further decline of 5.9 and 2.0 pointsrespectively one and two years after being exposed. Alternative specifications of ourbaseline model provide further insights. First, we find mixed evidence of intensificationeffects. Second, we find no evidence of non-linearities in the effect. Third, the negativeeffect is stronger before 1998. Fourth, the effect of tropical cyclone on motherhood ispersistent since in an extended model estimated coefficients are significantly negativeup to seven years after being exposed. The estimated effect is shown to be robust tothe use of alternative formulation of the wind speed variable but also to an alternativetreatment of geolocated data