Do Long-Run Disasters Promote Human Capital in China? —The Impact of 500 Years of Natural Disasters on County-Level Human-Capital Accumulation

Is there a relationship between the frequency of regional natural disasters and long-term human-capital accumulation? This article investigates the long-run causality between natural calamities and human-capital accumulation with macro and micro data. Empirical cross-county analysis demonstrates that higher frequencies of natural calamities are correlated with higher rates of human-capital accumulation. Specifically, on the basis of empirical data of the fifth census in 2000 and China’s Labor-Force Dynamics Survey in 2012, this paper exploits the two databases to infer that the high disaster frequency in the years of 1500–2000 was likely to increase regional human-capital accumulation on district level. High natural-calamity frequency reduces the expected rate of returning to physical capital, which also serves to increase human-capital. Thus, experiencing with natural disasters would influence human’s preference to human-capital investment instead of physical capital.