Graduation Year

2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Economics

Major Professor

Giulia La Mattina, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Padmaja Ayyagari, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Benjamin Jacob, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Xin Jin, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Gabriel Picone, Ph.D.

Keywords

Earthquake, Water Safety, Child Marriage, Education

Abstract

In developing countries, natural disasters could destroy physical capital and adversely affect human capital accumulation by disrupting individual decisions. Such decisions play a critical role in determining individuals' human capital accumulation process and have a lifelong effect on their happiness and economic prosperity. To better understand how natural disasters affect human capital in developing countries, this dissertation uses the earthquakes in Indonesia as a natural experiment to study how this earthquake affects health, child marriage, and education. For the first chapter, I study how the 2006 Yogyakarta Earthquake a affects water-related acute disease symptomsin the short and long run. By tracking individuals before and after the earthquake, I identify the wateidentifiedrborne diseases related symptoms decreased significantly one year and eight years after the earthquake. The improved access to safe water, which is the major concentration of the reconstruction program could explain t,he change, showing the that robust reconstruction program could turn a disastrous event into a beneficial one. For the second chapter, I explore how natural disasters affect the hazard rate of being married befobefore the age ofin Indonesia from 1990 to 2014. By tracking the migration and earthquake overtime, my coauthors and I show that earthquake resulted in less girls married before age of 18 in the rural area, more girl married in the urban area. This result indicates a graving and pressing needs for local and international governments to implement policies to alleviate negative impof from the natural disasters. For the last chapter, I explore how the 2006 Yogyakarta affected the total education years and likelihood of finishing different school level in the earthquake affected area. The result indicates that education process was largely disrupted after the earthquake, leading to education years lost and less students were able to finish senior high school and this effect is more pronounced among boys. Evidence from the labor market indicates that more boys left school for work and higher paid reconstruction jobs, giving evidence that reconstruction programs might have attracted boys to leave school and forced them to less education as a result. Such result indicates that although reconstruction might have helped the affected area, but it also caused unwanted consequences in education and local government might needs to provide better education policies to the affected region for long term human capital development.

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