 Parental human capital and child health at birth in IndiaMd Nazmul Ahsan and Riddhi Maharaj Economics & Human Biology, 2018, vol. 30, issue C, 130-149 Abstract: Health at birth shapes an individual's well-being over her life cycle. We categorize the Indian states into high and low infant mortality regions to capture the diverse disease environment and analyze the nature of the association between parental human capital and child survival and nutrition measures at birth. We restrict our analysis only to firstborns to avoid confounding from a number of factors including sex-selective abortions in the higher birth orders. We broadly find that parental human capital, especially maternal health, is a strong and significant predictor of a child's birth outcomes under adverse disease environment. In the rural areas of the high infant mortality states, a 10-centimeter increase in maternal height is associated with 1.7% lower probability of a child dying as a neonate and 5% increase in birth weight around the mean. These estimates suggest that an investment in human capital of the mothers from this region could accompany large gains in survival and nutrition outcomes of their children. Keywords: Birth endowments; Intergenerational Transmission; Human Capital; Disease Environment; Trivers-Willard Hypothesis (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:30:y:2018:i:c:p:130-149 DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2018.06.006 Access Statistics for this article Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier |
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