The Effects of Weather Shocks on Early Childhood Development

Diether Beuermann, Camilo Pecha G () and Juan Pedro Schmid

No 8543, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: This study analyzes the effects of exposure to tropical storms and hurricanes during pregnancy on children’s anthropometric measurements taken within the first five years of life. It combines destruction indexes at the district level with 13 yearly rounds of household level surveys from Jamaica. The empirical strategy exploits variation arising from the storms’ timing and intensity across different cohorts within the same district. The findings suggest that when expectant mothers living in coastal-rural areas are affected by at least two hurricanes, their children are 56 percentage points more likely to show low birth weight. Furthermore, these children also experience negative impacts on anthropometric measurements taken within the first five years of life equivalent to 1.88 standard deviations in weight-for-age and 1.4 standard deviations in weight-for-height.

Keywords: Jamaica; anthropometric measurements; tropical storms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... hood-Development.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:8543

DOI: 10.18235/0000839

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().