The role of maternal education in child health: Evidence from a compulsory schooling law

This paper explores the effect of maternal education on child health and the channels in which education operates by exploiting a change in the compulsory schooling law (CSL) in Turkey. In order to account for the endogeneity of education, variation across cohorts induced by the timing of the CSL and variation across provinces by the intensity of additional classrooms constructed in the mother’s birth provinces is used as an instrumental variable. The results indicate that mother’s primary school completion improves infant health, as measured by very low birth weight, and child health, as measured by height-for-age and weight-for-age z-scores, even after controlling for many potential confounding factors. This paper also demonstrates that maternal education leads to earlier preventive care initiation, reduces smoking, reduces fertility, and increases age at first birth.