Résumé en anglais

We look at the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 Côte d'Ivoire and study to which extent cocoa producers' children su®ered from this severe aggregate shock in terms of school enrollment, labor, height stature and morbidity. Using pre-crisis (1985-88) and post- crisis (1993) data, we propose a di®erence-in-di®erence strategy to identify the causal e®ect of the cocoa shock on child outcomes, whereby we compare children of cocoa-producing households and children of other farmers living in the same district or the same village. This causal e®ect is shown to be rather strong for the four child outcomes we examine. Hence human capital investments are de¯nitely procyclical in this context. We also argue that the di®erence-in-di®erence variations can be interpreted as private income e®ects, likely to derive from tight liquidity constraints.