Ermias Gebru Weldesenbet forsvarer sin ph.d.-afhandling

Abstract

The Ph.D. thesis contains three self-contained chapters, focusing on the long-term outcomes of different childhood experiences. Because children are vulnerable to early life experiences, whether they have a good or bad start has long-term implications on their life. For that reason, understanding childhood conditions that affect later life outcomes is of paramount importance to policymaking. While there is a large body of literature on developed countries, the empirical investigation of early life conditions for developing countries, especially sub-Saharan Africa, has been constrained mainly due to the lack of longitudinal data following children for a long time. The thesis seeks to address this lacuna in African research by exploring three diverse childhood conditions affecting outcomes in adulthood.

Chapter 1, “Intergenerational Poverty Transmission in Tanzania: The role of parental resources”, explores the extent of intergenerational poverty as well as one of the mechanisms of poverty transmission in Tanzania using a long-running household panel data. I find that the risk of falling into poverty remained low, while the probability of escaping from poverty increased between childhood and adulthood. In adulthood, children from poor families have a poverty risk (0.38) three times higher than those from non-poor family backgrounds (0.13). Investigating the role of parental resources in the intergenerational transmission of poverty, I find that parental financial resource in childhood is strongly associated with an individual’s poverty risk in early adulthood. The results further indicate that human capital investment in children mediates some of the effects of childhood parental resources on economic status in adulthood. The results imply that interventions supporting low-income families build their children’s human capital are essential to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty.

Chapter 2, “The Long-Term Effects of Early-Life Exposure to Weather Shocks: Evidence from Tanzania”, examines whether early-life exposure to rainfall shocks has a long-term impact on individuals' health, education, and socioeconomic status in rural Tanzania, where livelihoods heavily depend on rain-fed agriculture. I use a unique panel of data from a Kagera Health and Development Survey (KHDS) in which children were followed from childhood (1991) to adulthood (2010), together with historical rainfall data. I find that rainfall in the birth year affects the education and socioeconomic statuses of children in adulthood. A 15 percent increase in rainfall in one's birth year and birth village (relative to average village rainfall) leads children to have 0.21 more years of schooling and live in a household in 2010 that scores 0.19 higher on an asset index. I then explore the relationship between early-life rainfall and childhood nutritional status to identify early-life rainfall's initial effect. Higher birth-year rainfall leads to significant decreases in height and weight deficits in children. A 15 percent increase in rainfall in one's birth year and birth village (relative to average village rainfall) improves the height-for-age z score by 0.20 and weight-for-age z score by 0.26. When taken together, the results point to the importance of early childhood nutrition intervention.

Chapter 3, “Emigration and education: the schooling of the left behind in Nigeria” (joint with Biniam Bedasso and Nonso Obikili), investigates the impact of family migration on left-behind children educational attainment using household survey data from Nigeria. Because the migration status of households is endogenous, we use the proportion of migrants in a local district and historical exposure to foreigners as proxied by distance to foreign missionary station in 1921 as instruments for migration of household members. We find that being in a migrant household increases the probability of completing secondary school and attending some postsecondary education. We also find that belonging to a migrant household increases the probability of own future migration. We further explore channels through which the migration of family members affects education. We provide tentative evidence suggesting that anticipation of own future migration may be behind increased educational attainment.