The legacy of Agent Orange: Prenatal exposure to dioxin and human capital formation

This paper examines the effect of prenatal exposure to Agent Orange, a dioxin-contaminated herbicide that was dispersed on a large scale in South Vietnam for military operations during the Vietnam War, on educational attainment of Vietnamese civilians. The identification strategy exploits province-by-cohort variation in the intensity of Agent Orange sprayed. I find that controlling for conventional bombing, cohorts exposed in utero to Agent Orange (who were born between 1962 and 1971) have lower educational attainment compared to other birth cohorts. The same inference is obtained when employing an instrumental-variable approach that uses the density of North Vietnamese army bases as an instrument for the intensity of Agent Orange. The findings demonstrate that prenatal health shocks resulting from exposure to toxic chemicals play an important role in shaping human capital formation.