The Impact of Parental Death on Child Well-being: Evidence from the Indian Ocean Tsunami

Identifying the impact of parental death on the well-being of children is complicated because parental death is likely to be correlated with other, unobserved, factors that affect child well-being. Population-representative longitudinal data collected in Aceh, Indonesia, before and after the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami are used to identify the impact of parental deaths on the well-being of children who were age 9 through 17 years old at the time of the tsunami. Exploiting the unanticipated nature of parental death due to the tsunami in combination with measuring well-being of the same children before and after the tsunami, models that include child fixed effects are estimated to isolate the causal effect of parental death.[BREAD Working Paper No. 393]. URL:[http://ipl.econ.duke.edu/bread/papers/working/393.pdf].