The Causal Effects of Adverse Temperature Shocks on Schooling Outcomes in India

Do extreme weather events adversely affect educational outcomes of kids in India? To address this question, we link school records across India with information on local weather conditions with a special focus on extreme heat. Both, cumulative heat exposure and exposure to higher temperatures during examinations adversely affect education and students’ performance. By making use of the geo-coded address of schools in combination with fine-scaled weather information over four school years, we thus can track the success of students over several years keeping variation other than weather-impacts constant. Preliminary results show that a constant increase in temperature by merely 0.5°C means a drop in the number of students passing the exam by 1% (25,554) and a drop in the number of highest grades (“distinctions”) of almost 4% (522,667) hinting towards a sizable potential loss in human capital. The effect on the probability of passing the exam is increasingly negative for higher temperature brackets, and the effect is largest for days with a maximum temperature of above 40°C. Finally, we exploit canopy-height data to provide preliminary evidence that vegetation in the proximity of the schools has a mitigating effect that increases with canopy height and forest cover density.

Francesco Scarazzato is a teaching and research associate at the Department of Economics at the WU Wien, where he is also a PhD candidate. He was previously a visiting researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) in Berlin. His research interests include energy economics, environmental economics and applied econometrics.