IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/uwp/jhriss/v36y2001i1p185-205.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Child Health and School Enrollment: A Longitudinal Analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Harold Alderman
  • Jere R. Behrman
  • Victor Lavy
  • Rekha Menon

Abstract

Better child health is widely thought to improve school performance, and therefore post-school productivity. But most of the literature ignores that child health as well as child schooling reflects behavioral choices. Therefore the estimated impact of child health on child schooling in these studies may be biased, perhaps substantially. This study employs longitudinal data to investigate the impact of child health (as indicated by nutritional status) on school enrollments in rural Pakistan using an explicit dynamic model for the preferred estimates. These estimates use price shocks when children were of preschool age to control for behavior determining the child health stock measure. They indicate that child health (nutrition) is three times as important for enrollment than suggested by "naive estimates" that assume that child health is predetermined rather than determined by household choices in the presence of unobserved factors such as preferences and health endowments. These results, therefore, reinforce strongly the importance of using estimation methods that are consistent with the economic theory of households to explore the impact of some choice variables on others using socioeconomic behavioral data.

Suggested Citation

  • Harold Alderman & Jere R. Behrman & Victor Lavy & Rekha Menon, 2001. "Child Health and School Enrollment: A Longitudinal Analysis," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 36(1), pages 185-205.
  • Handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:36:y:2001:i:1:p:185-205
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3069675
    Download Restriction: A subscripton is required to access pdf files. Pay per article is available.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uwp:jhriss:v:36:y:2001:i:1:p:185-205. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://jhr.uwpress.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.