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Life Expectancy and Human Capital Investments: Evidence From Maternal Mortality Declines

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Author Info
Seema Jayachandran
Adriana Lleras-Muney

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Abstract

Longer life expectancy should encourage human capital accumulation, since a longer time horizon increases the value of investments that pay out over time. Previous work has been unable to determine the empirical importance of this life-expectancy effect due to the difficulty of isolating it from other effects of health on education. We examine a sudden drop in maternal mortality risk in Sri Lanka between 1946 and 1953, which creates a sharp increase in life expectancy for school-age girls without contemporaneous effects on health, and which also allows for the use of boys as a control group. Using additional geographic variation, we find that the 70% reduction in maternal mortality risk over the sample period increased female life expectancy at age 15 by 4.1%, female literacy by 2.5%, and female years of education by 4.0%.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 13947.

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Date of creation: Apr 2008
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13947

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
O15 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration

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  1. Christopher H. Wheeler, 2007. "Human capital externalities and adult mortality in the U.S," Working Papers 2007-045, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  2. Anupam Jena & Casey Mulligan & Tomas J. Philipson & Eric Sun, 2008. "The Value of Life in General Equilibrium," NBER Working Papers 14157, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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