“the Dust Was Long in Settling”: Human Capital and the Lasting Impact of the American Dust Bowl

I use variation in childhood exposure to the Dust Bowl, an environmental shock to health and income, as a natural experiment to explain variation in adult human capital. I find that the Dust Bowl produced significant adverse impacts in later life, especially when exposure was in utero, increasing rates of poverty and disability, and decreasing rates of fertility and college completion. Agriculture-dependence exacerbates these effects. The destruction of farms, however, had the beneficial effect of raising high school completion rates amongst the exposed by reducing the demand for child farm labor and thus decreasing the opportunity costs of secondary schooling.