Gender inequality, economic growth, and the intergenerational transmission of adverse health consequences at birth

Mengcen Qian, Shin-Yi Chou, Mary E. Deily and Jin-Tan Liu

Social Science & Medicine, 2018, vol. 200, issue C, 174-181

Abstract: We estimate a gender differential in the intergenerational transmission of adverse birth outcomes. We link Taiwan birth certificates from 1978 to 2006 to create a sample of children born in the period 1999–2006 that includes information about their parents and their maternal grandmothers. We use maternal-sibling fixed effects to control for unobserved family-linked factors that may be correlated with birth outcomes across generations, and define adverse birth outcomes as small for gestational age. We find that when a mother is in the 5th percentile of birth weight for her gestational age, then her female children are 49–53% more likely to experience the same adverse birth outcome compared to other female children, while her male children are 27–32% more likely to experience this relative to other male children. We then investigate whether long-run improvements in local socio-economic conditions experienced by the child's family, as measured by intergenerational changes in town-level maternal education, affect the gender differential. We find no evidence that intergenerational improvements in socioeconomic conditions reduce the gender differential.

Keywords: Intergenerational transmission; Adverse health outcomes at birth; Gender differential; Economic growth; Taiwan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I14 I15 I24 I25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953618300200
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:socmed:v:200:y:2018:i:c:p:174-181

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.01.020

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().