Long-term impacts on human capital of children exposed to a natural disaster

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ABSTRACT This project will investigate the long-term impacts of an unanticipated large-scale natural disaster on the human capital and wellbeing of exposed youth. Data will come from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR), a 15-year panel study of coastal communities, households, and individuals in Aceh and North Sumatra on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, who were at risk of exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. In contrast to previous studies of childhood aversity on long-term outcomes, STAR is designed to leverage the natural experiment of the tsunami to study the causal effects of large-scale adverse events on a large sample of individuals that is representative of the pre-tsunami population. Our project will focus on respondents who were under the age of 17 at the time of the disaster and were therefore in adolescence and early adulthood (roughly 15-31 years of age) at the 15-year follow-up. We will investigate the separate impacts of both community- and individual-level tsunami exposures on outcomes related to human capital spanning education, cognitive performance, and health, as well as domains of early adult life like work and earnings, marriage, fertility, and migration. We will contribute evidence on how effects differ by age of exposure and heterogeneity in effects between, for example, males and females, those who lost parents or other family members. This project will also fully leverage all eight rounds of STAR panel data (one baseline and seven follow-up rounds) to closely trace out the trajectories of child outcomes in the initial and intermediate post-disaster periods, as well as continue to follow those outcomes into the longer-term, which will provide detailed insights into post-disaster resiliency and recovery and into the mechanisms underlying the long-term impacts of the disaster that studies with fewer survey rounds cannot observe.