Extreme Weather Events and Child Height: Evidence from Mongolia

•Household panel data are used to study the impact of an extremely severe winter.•Exposure to the shock reduces the height of children from herding households.•The negative health impact of the weather shock is persistent in the medium term.•Health damages are driven by exposure to the weather shock during gestation.•Emergency aid and informal help are correlated with better child health. We provide new evidence on the impact of one severe weather event on child height in Mongolia. While previous studies mostly focus on rainfall shocks in tropical or dry climate areas, our focus is on the extremely harsh winter that hit Mongolia in 2009–10. The severe winter—locally referred to as a dzud—caused catastrophic damage and resulted in the death of 10.3million livestock. Our analysis identifies the causal impact of the weather shock on children’s height by exploiting exogenous variation in the intensity of the shock across time and space. We use data on the height of children from two waves of a panel survey specifically designed to assess the impact of weather events. Results reveal that the shock significantly slowed the growth trajectory of exposed children from herding households. This negative effect is persistent, remaining observable in both panel waves, three and four years after the shock. The effect is driven by children who experienced the shock in utero. There is indicative evidence that the provision of emergency aid mitigates the negative consequences of the shock. Moreover, child height has a significant and positive association with households’ receipt of informal help. Our findings are robust to alternative measures of shock intensity from different data sources.