Natural Disasters and Human Capital Accumulation

The author assesses empirically the relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in education. Although the results in the empirical literature tend to be inconclusive, using model averaging methods in the framework of cross-country and panel regressions, this paper finds an extremely robust negative partial correlation between secondary school enrollment and natural disaster risk. This result is exclusively driven by geological disasters. Natural disaster risk exposure is a robust determinant of differences in secondary school enrollment between countries, but not within countries, which implies that the effect can be interpreted as a long-run phenomenon.