Fasting During Pregnancy and Children's Academic Performance

Douglas Almond, Bhashkar Mazumder and Reyn Van Ewijk

CEE Discussion Papers from Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE

Abstract: We consider the effects of daytime fasting by pregnant women during the lunar month of Ramadan on their children's test scores at age seven. Using English register data, we find that scores are .05 to .08 standard deviations lower for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students exposed to Ramadan in early pregnancy. These estimates are downward biased to the extent that Ramadan is not universally observed. We conclude that the effects of prenatal investments on test scores are comparable to many conventional educational interventions but are likely to be more cost effective and less subject to "fade out".

Keywords: educational outcomes; pregnancy; fasting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cee/ceedp134.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Fasting During Pregnancy and Children's Academic Performance (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:ceedps:0134

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEE Discussion Papers from Centre for the Economics of Education, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().