An emerging literature finds that childhood exposure to adverse events determines adult outcomes and behavior. We extend this research to understand the influence of witnessing a sibling death as a child on subsequent educational and fertility outcomes in Indonesia. Using panel data and a sibling fixed effects model, we identify this relationship based on variation in the age of surviving children within the same family. Our findings strongly support the importance and persistence of adverse childhood experiences. In particular, for surviving sisters, witnessing a sibling death reduces the years of completed education and the likelihood of completing secondary schooling. The effect on surviving brothers is more muted. A potential channel for this result is that women respond by changing their fertility behavior. While surviving the death of a sibling has little effect on desired fertility levels, we find evidence that surviving sisters start a family about 3-4 years earlier. This suggests that interventions targeted at early-life outcomes may have important ripple effects and that the full impact of health interventions may not be visible until decades afterwards.

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With the increasing number of natural disasters, understanding the links between these events and child health has become timely and pertinent. Using a panel dataset, this paper empirically investigates the persistent effects on child health due to exposure to a series of natural disasters that occurred from 2002 to 2007 in Indonesia. We find that girls exposed to multiple disaster events are 0.19 standard deviations shorter and are 7 per cent more likely to be stunted when measured 7 to 12 years later. We find no persistent effect on boys. From a public policy perspective, we highlight the need for coping strategies beyond access to credit or remittances in order to mitigate growth retardation in children.

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In this paper, we go beyond traditional measures of cognitive abilities (IQ) in explaining labor market and social outcomes in developing countries. We exploit a rich dataset from Ghana that provides information on demographics, labor market outcomes, and a direct measure of cognitive ability along with other test scores to construct a measure of sustained attention. Our work is therefore related to the broader literature in psychology on the importance of executive function on individual behavior and outcomes. We find that, at least for the case of Ghana, after controlling for IQ and other covariates, higher levels of sustained attention are associated with higher educational attainment and a higher likelihood of being employed in a white‐collar job.