A new paper by Paul Christian and Brian Dillon poses this question: “Does a consistently seasonal diet during childhood have long-run effects on human capital formation?” They use Tanzania’s Kagera Health and Development Survey — a 19-year panel survey — to answer the question. As you can see from the figure below, Tanzania has dramatic seasonality: Children have very different access to food in some parts of the year than in others.
Christian and Dillon develop a structural model — which you can read all about in the paper — and use the household data to estimate it.
Here is a taste of the results:
We find a robust, negative relationship between consumption seasonality and human capital formation. Across specifications, the negative relationship between seasonality and human capital is 30-60% of the magnitude of the positive relationship between average consumption and human capital (in the same units). … The effects of seasonality on height is greatest for children in utero and during infancy, during the critical first 1,000 days of life. Effects on education are most pronounced for older children, suggesting that behavioral channels such as dropping out of school to help on the farm are more important in this sample than early life impacts on cognitive performance. When we further allow for heterogeneity by both age and gender, we see that the height effects during infancy are concentrated among girls, while the education effects during adolescence are largely driven by boys.
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