Gender inequality, economic growth, and the intergenerational transmission of adverse health consequences at birth

We estimate a gender differential in the intergenerational transmission of adverse birth outcomes. We link Taiwan birth certificates from 1978 to 2006 to create a sample of children born in the period 1999–2006 that includes information about their parents and their maternal grandmothers. We use maternal-sibling fixed effects to control for unobserved family-linked factors that may be correlated with birth outcomes across generations, and define adverse birth outcomes as small for gestational age. We find that when a mother is in the 5th percentile of birth weight for her gestational age, then her female children are 49–53% more likely to experience the same adverse birth outcome compared to other female children, while her male children are 27–32% more likely to experience this relative to other male children. We then investigate whether long-run improvements in local socio-economic conditions experienced by the child's family, as measured by intergenerational changes in town-level maternal education, affect the gender differential. We find no evidence that intergenerational improvements in socioeconomic conditions reduce the gender differential.