Effects of Prenatal Exposure to Wildfires on Children's Height and Weight: Evidence from Russia

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate whether prenatal exposure to forest fires affects children’s health in Russia. We show that in-utero exposure to forest fires in the first trimester is associated with reductions in body height but not weight. More specifically, we find that an exposure to a standard-deviation increase in the area burned in the neighborhood in the first trimester reduces standardized height among children aged below 16 years old by about 0.03 standard deviations. We conduct a battery of robustness checks and yield similar results.