Natural Disasters, Missing Pupils: Evidence from Colonial Jamaica’s School System

This study provides a quantitative analysis of how recurrent natural disasters disrupted schooling and human capital formation in a low-capacity colonial setting. The central purpose is to determine the causal impact of hurricanes on school attendance and academic performance in colonial Jamaica from 1892 to 1942. The study investigates the primary mechanisms driving these effects and examines how impacts varied across parishes with different economic and institutional characteristics. The analysis is based on a newly assembled monthly panel dataset covering the 50-year period. The dataset links parish-level school attendance records and annual school-level examination scores, which were digitized from historical government publications including The Jamaica Gazette and The Jamaican Bluebooks. This educational data is merged with meteorological data, primarily six-hourly hurricane wind-field reconstructions derived from the HURDAT database. Hurricane exposure is measured using both a continuous wind-power index and discrete category indicators. Additional data on historical population, used to create a population-weighted destruction index, were sourced from the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE 3.2). Major topics covered include the dynamic effects of hurricane strikes on monthly school attendance, the impact on annual student examination marks, and the mediating role of school absence in explaining learning loss. The study also explores heterogeneous effects based on parish-level characteristics, including urbanization, dependence on agriculture, and historical volatility in school attendance. The dataset includes controls for other major shocks, such as the 1907 Kingston Earthquake (measured on the Rossi-Forel scale) and the 1918 influenza epidemic. The causal effects are estimated using several econometric models.