Essays on Climate Shocks, Food Security, and Human Capital Formation in Ethiopia [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

Across three interconnected essays, this dissertation examines how climate vulnerability and food insecurity shape human capital formation in Ethiopia through psychological, biological, and productive channels. The first channel is psychological. Using longitudinal data from the Young Lives Ethiopia study (2002–2016), Chapter 1 examines how household food insecurity relates to adolescents’ educational aspirations using both cross-sectional and child fixed-effects models. While cross-sectional models reveal a significant negative association, child fixed-effects models show that this relationship is not robust to within-child changes in food insecurity. This pattern is consistent across wealth strata. The absence of a within-child association suggests that the cross-sectional gradient primarily reflects persistent differences across households and children rather than adolescents’ responses to short-term hardship. The second channel is biological. Chapter 2 constructs a multidimensional Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI) combining exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, and integrates it with geolocated climate data and three rounds of the Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey conducted between 2011 and 2019 to examine the relationship between household climate vulnerability and childhood stunting, a form of impaired growth associated with chronic undernutrition. The analysis shows that greater climate vulnerability is significantly associated with a higher risk of stunting. This relationship persists despite a decline in average national stunting rates over the period, indicating that climate vulnerability remains a constraint on early-life human capital accumulation. The third channel is productive. Using the Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey panel (2011–2016), Chapter 3 employs household fixed-effects models to examine whether institutional support can buffer the effects of climate shocks. The analysis shows that agricultural extension services, which facilitate access to knowledge, skills, and technologies, have no average effect on productivity in normal years but substantially offset drought-induced harvest losses during severe rainfall deficits, operating as shock-contingent rather than unconditional insurance. Together, the three essays show that educational aspirations are resilient to short-term food insecurity, while the biological and productive foundations of human capital needed to realize those aspirations remain vulnerable to climate stress. Institutional support can partly offset these vulnerabilities when it is responsive to adverse shocks rather than provided as a uniform productivity intervention. The findings point to three policy priorities: improving early childhood nutrition, household resources, and school quality; intensifying nutrition interventions in climate-vulnerable regions; and scaling up agricultural support systems to protect households against climate-induced livelihood losses.