The Impact of Extreme Weather Events on Children’s Height: Evidence from Mongolia

Abstract

Shocks experienced during early childhood can harm the long term growth of children. We examine the potential impact of extreme weather events on children’s height,taking the example of Mongolia, which is frequently plagued by extreme winters. Our focus is on the unusually harsh winter of 2009/10, which caused the deaths of over 10 million animals, approximately 23.9 percent of the country’s entire stock. We identify causal effects by exploiting exogenous variation in the intensity of the shock across time and space. We find that the extreme winter of 2009/10 considerably impaired the growth of exposed children from herding households. Exposed children are small for their age, even three years after the event. It can be expected that the cohorts of exposed children will be smaller, poorer, and less healthy, even as adults.