Climate, Culture, and History : Essays in Development Economics

This thesis consists of four self-contained chapters that explore two areas in development economics: the impact of geography and climate on health, learning, and financial decision-making, and the influence of history and culture on human and social capital.In the first chapter, we study the effect of waterborne disease risk on children’s health and learning in Tanzania. Using a hydrological model to simulate stagnant water occurrence and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that stagnant water increases the probability of diarrhea among young children, and reduces test scores among school-going children. The effect is primarily driven by urban households that lack access to safe water and sanitation. We find that climate change may have a dramatic impact on the future disease burden. Fortunately, our results suggest that policymakers can mitigate this risk by optimally targeting water and sanitation investments.The second chapter aims to improve our understanding of how poor rural households cope with climate risks. I identify a new variable that drives rural households’ financial coping strategies: climate instability, defined as the average difference in yearly climate conditions. Using novel global data on financial decision-making, I find that exposure to climate instability increases both saving and credit uptake. This is driven primarily by unskilled rural households, and saving is deliberately precautionary, reducing the threat of future food shortages.In the third chapter, we examine the effect of traditional kinship norms on parental investment in children's human capital, focusing on the two predominant types: patrilineal and matrilineal systems. Using detailed survey data on parental investment behavior from Tanzania and a fuzzy spatial regression discontinuity design, we find that matrilineal parents devote less time and attention to their children’s learning. Matrilineal children exhibit lower cognitive skills, as captured by standardized test scores. Exploring mechanisms, we find that matrilineal spouses experience more conflict and family instability, cooperate less, and experience different labor market conditions. Lastly, we find that a nation-building reform did not counteract the influence of traditional norms.In the fourth chapter, we revisit the effect of the slave trade on mistrust in Africa. We show that the slave trade led to a culture of mistrust only in those societies where ancestral slavery was present. Furthermore, in societies with greater exposure to preexisting slave markets, and where slave labor was more common, the effect on mistrust is greater. We shed more light on the mechanism by showing that the proportion of child slaves -- a proxy for the likelihood of being kidnapped into slavery -- was higher in areas that were more integrated into preexisting slave markets.