We estimate the harm from smoking during pregnancy upon child birth outcomes, using arich dataset on a cohort of mothers and their births. We exploit a fixed effects approach todisentangle the correlation between smoking and birth weight from the causal effect. We findthat, despite a detailed set of controls for maternal traits, around one-third of the harm fromsmoking is explained by unobservable traits of the mother. Smoking tends to reduce birthweight by 1.7%, but has no significant effect on the probability of having a low birth weightchild, pre-term gestation or weeks of gestation. Exploring heterogeneity in the effect on birthweight, it is mothers who smoke for the 9 months of gestation that suffer the harm, whereasthere is an insignificant effect for mothers who chose to quit by month 5. Additionally, thereis evidence of potential complementarity in investment of human capital, as the impact onbirth weight of smoking is much greater for low educated mothers, even controlling for thequantity of cigarettes they smoke. We suggest policy should target the low educated mothers,offering a more holistic approach to improving child health, as quitting smoking is only halfof the battle.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Centre for Economic Performance, LSE in its series CEP Discussion Papers with number
dp0828.
Find related papers by JEL classification: I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Production I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)