Death and Schooling Decisions over the Short and Long Run in Rural Madagascar

This paper provides strong evidence that adult mortality has a negative impacton children education outcomes, both over the short and the long run, in ruralMadagascar. The underlying longitudinal data set and the di erence-in-di erencesstrategy used overcome most of the previous cross-section studies limitations, suchas failure to control for child and household pre-death characteristics and unob-served heterogeneity. This paper also pays special attention to the heterogeneityand robustness of the e ects estimated. Using a three year panel of school-agedchildren, our results show that orphans are 20% less likely to attend school the yearfollowing death than their non-orphaned counterparts. This e ect is even more pro-nounced for girls, young orphans and children from relatively poorer households.Pushing further the analysis to a sample of adults, our results show that those whobecame orphans in their childhood completed on average one year of educationless. These findings suggest that, in a context where resources are scarce and for-mal insurance and market mechanisms are failing, not only do households su eringunexpected shocks resort to children schooling adjustments as an immediate riskcoping strategy