The role of health at birth and parental investment in early child development: evidence from the French ELFE cohort

Marion Davin () and Emmanuelle Lavaine ()
Additional contact information
Marion Davin: CEE-M, Univ. Montpellier, CNRS, INRAE, SupAgro
Emmanuelle Lavaine: CEE-M, Univ. Montpellier, CNRS, INRAE, SupAgro

The European Journal of Health Economics, 2021, vol. 22, issue 8, No 6, 1217-1237

Abstract: Abstract This paper combines a theoretical and an empirical approach to address how health at birth affects child development. Using a simple theoretical model in which parents invest in their children, we identify the mechanisms through which better health at birth can improve child development. We also emphasise how parental socioeconomic status can shape the effects of health at birth. We perform an empirical analysis on a French cohort of children born in 2011, using a unique dataset ELFE. We identify the effect of birth weight and gestational age on child development at 1 year. The results indicate that only gestational age positively affects early development. We find no empirical evidence for the existence of a severity effect, according to which the adverse effects of poor health at birth are higher for children in low-income families or with poorly educated mothers.

Keywords: Early child development; Health at birth; Parental investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 I14 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10198-021-01332-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:eujhec:v:22:y:2021:i:8:d:10.1007_s10198-021-01332-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10198/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10198-021-01332-x

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J.-M.G.v.d. Schulenburg

More articles in The European Journal of Health Economics from Springer, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().