Protected or exposed: the impact of rainfall shocks on children’s nutritional vulnerability and the role of women’s empowerment

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of rainfall shocks on children’s food resource shares in Bangladesh and examines the potential mediating role of women’s empowerment. Using panel data from 2,603 households across the 2011/12, 2015, and 2018/19 survey waves, I estimate a fixed-effects mediation analysis and employ double-lasso regressions for control variable selection, along with bootstrapped standard errors to test the significance of the direct, indirect, and total effects. Results indicate that the detrimental effects of rainfall shocks on children’s food resource shares are concentrated among boys. Rainfall shocks are associated with a reduction in the share of household calories allocated to boys. Boys’ calorie shares fall by 0.173 percentage points for every liter of rainfall above one standard deviation from the mean. Women’s empowerment is positively associated with children’s calorie shares. However, the analysis does not confirm a mediating effect of women’s empowerment. These findings highlight the need for targeted policy interventions to safeguard boys’ nutritional outcomes in the wake of climate-related shocks.