Households tend to have heterogeneous responses to natural phenomena, such as deciding whether and when to have children. This paper analyzes the mid-term effect of housing affectations caused by the floods during the “La Niña” phenomenon on fertility decisions. Unlike some analyses of climate shocks and fertility decisions developed in the context of significant losses in life and infrastructure, “La Niña” did not represent a high risk in people’s lives. However, it was large enough to generate shocks in families’ decisions via loss of jobs and crops or other means of subsistence that could reduce the household’s sources of income. We use a difference-in-differences strategy to compare municipalities with high exposure to flooding, measured by the percentage of affected homes, against municipalities with low exposure before and after the climate shock. Our main results suggest an increase of 6% in the average total fertility rate (TFR) in the most flood-affected municipalities during the winter season. We argue that this effect is driven by the Colombian government’s broad humanitarian aid policy and the perception of children as income insurance in the long term.
