Maternal Age and Offspring Human Capital in India

Marcello Perez Alvarez and Marta Favara

VfS Annual Conference 2020 (Virtual Conference): Gender Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: The consequences of early motherhood for the offspring are severely understudied, especially in low- and middle-income countries, where this phenomenon is prevalent. Using panel data from India, this paper investigates the effect of early maternal age on offspring human capital in terms of health and cognition. The analysis relies on mother fixed effects to allow for mother unobserved heterogeneity and explores for the first time the evolution of effects over time, covering the offspring phases of childhood and early adolescence. Our results indicate that children born to early mothers are shorter for their age and perform poorer in the math test, with stronger effects for (female) offspring born to very young mothers. Interestingly, the Adolescent Motherhood, Human Capital, Child Development, Cognition, Health, Nutrition, Gender, Parenting effect on health weakens over time, while the cognition effect surges in early adolescence. Further analysis suggests both biological and behavioral factors as transmission channels.

Keywords: Adolescent Motherhood; Human Capital; Child Development; Cognition; Health; Nutrition; Gender; Parenting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 I25 J13 J16 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/224656/1/vfs-2020-pid-40886.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Maternal Age and Offspring Human Capital in India (2019)
Working Paper: Maternal Age and Offspring Human Capital in India
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:zbw:vfsc20:224656

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2020 (Virtual Conference): Gender Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().