Mothers and Fathers: Education, Co-residence, and Child Health

This paper evaluates the causal effects of mother's and father's education on child-health outcomes in Zimbabwe, exploiting the exogenous variation generated by the 1980 education reform. We use four waves of Demographic and Health Surveys for Zimbabwe and estimate a simultaneous-equation model to take into account possible selection into co-residence between parents and children, endogeneity biases, and parental education sorting. Our results suggest that father's education affects the health outcomes of under-5 children and matters more than that of the mother. These results continue to hold in a number of robustness checks. Moreover, while there is selection into co-residence with the child, this does not affect the causal effect of education on child health. Last, parental educational sorting is also shown to be important. Our findings suggest that not taking the education of both parents into account simultaneously may yield misleading conclusions.