Long-term impacts on human capital of children exposed to a natural disaster
Summary
This project will investigate the long-term impacts of an unanticipated large-scale natural disaster on the human capital and wellbeing of exposed youth. Data will come from the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR), a 15-year panel study of coastal communities, households, and individuals in Aceh and North Sumatra on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, who were at risk of exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, that is designed to leverage the natural experiment of the tsunami to study the causal effects of large-scale adverse events on a large sample of individuals that was representative of the pre- tsunami population. This project will also fully leverage all eight rounds of STAR panel data (one baseline and seven follow-up rounds) to closely trace out the trajectories of child outcomes in the initial and intermediate post-disaster periods, as well as continue to follow those outcomes into the longer-term, which will provide detailed insights into post-disaster resiliency and recovery and into the mechanisms underlying the long-term impacts of the disaster that studies with fewer survey rounds cannot observe.