The Long-Term Effects of Early-Life Exposure to Weather Shocks: Evidence from Tanzania

Most of the studies in the area come from developed countries, and there is relatively little work on developing countries due to a lack of data.1 Given that the nature and frequency of early-life shocks and the availability and effectiveness of mitigation strategies are very different between developed and developing countries, much remains to be discovered about the long-term effects of early- l. [...] The model then estimates the rainfall effect by regress- ing within-family differences in the outcome on the differences in the independent variables. [...] A similar approach is used to calculate the deviation of rainfall from the long-run average in the years before and after the birth year. [...] By contrast, the direction of relationships between birth-year rainfall and the respective adult outcomes are not apparent in the rest of the panels. [...] In the primary analysis, we focused on the deviation of birth-year rainfall from the long-run village average, since we aim to identify the effect of more “typical” variation in rainfall on adult outcomes.