The long shadow of natural disasters: educational impacts of the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh
利用1991年孟加拉国气旋作为自然实验，研究发现早期暴露于气旋使儿童受教育年限减少约一年，中学完成率下降12-19个百分点，且女孩和农村儿童损失更大，经济约束和基础设施破坏是主要传导机制。
• Utilizes the 1991 cyclone to provide causal evidence on the impact of early-life exposure to natural disasters on education. • Cyclone exposure reduced schooling by one year and lowered secondary school completion rates by 12–19 percentage points. • Educational losses were twice as large for girls, and rural children experienced greater deficits. • Children in less affected districts showed worse outcomes, implying failures in relief allocation. • Economic constraints, infrastructure damage, and maternal stress were the primary transmission channels. Using the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh as a natural experiment, this paper examines the long-term educational impacts of early-life disaster exposure. We employ a differences-in-differences approach with data from the 2019 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey to compare educational outcomes between disaster-affected and unaffected districts across birth cohorts with varying exposure timing. The results reveal substantial and persistent negative effects of early-life cyclone exposure on educational attainment. Children exposed during critical early developmental periods (ages 0–3) experience approximately one year reduction in completed schooling, with secondary completion falling by 12–19 percentage points and higher secondary completion by 10–17 percentage points. Mechanism analysis reveals economic hardship as the primary transmission channel, operating through household budget constraints that force reductions in educational investment. Infrastructure damage creates additional barriers through reduced access, while maternal psychological stress extends impacts to post-disaster birth cohorts. Disaster impacts exacerbate existing inequalities: girls experience roughly double the educational losses of boys, while rural populations face consistently larger impacts. The concentration of effects at secondary and higher secondary education levels suggests that disasters may perpetuate intergenerational poverty by blocking access to the formal labor market, where secondary education is often the minimum requirement. Robustness checks, including threats to identification and placebo tests, confirmed that these results reflected a genuine impact of the cyclone rather than coincidental patterns. These findings are urgent given projected increases in extreme weather frequency under climate change, providing strong justification for integrating disaster resilience into human capital development strategies in vulnerable developing countries.