Arnaud Chevalier (Department of Economics, Royal Holloway, University of London, and Geary Institute, University College Dublin) Vincent O'Sullivan (Department of Economics, Warwick University and Geary Institute, University College Dublin)
Additional information is available for the following
registered author(s):
Low birth weight has considerable short and long-term consequences and leads to high costs to the individual and society even in a developed economy. Low birth weight is partially a consequence of choices made by the mother pre- and during pregnancy. Thus policies affecting these choices could have large returns. Using British data, maternal education is found to be positively correlated with birth weight. We identify a causal effect of education using the 1947 reform of the minimum school leaving age. Change in compulsory school leaving age has been previously used as an instrument, but has been criticised for mostly picking up time trends. Here, we demonstrate that the policy effects differ by social background and hence provide identification across cohorts but also within cohort. We find modest but heterogenous positive effects of maternal education on birth weight with an increase from the baseline weight ranging from 2% to 6%.
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 Geary Institute, University College Dublin in its series Working Papers with number
200725.
Find related papers by JEL classification: I12 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Production I29 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Other
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
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.)