In-utero social interaction of twins

Eskil Heinesen, S. Imai and Shiko Maruyama

Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers from HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York

Abstract: We model pre-birth twins' competition for maternal resources inside the womb. When the innate endowment affects both birth weight and the post-birth outcome directly, pre-natal social interaction leads to bias in thestandard twin fixed-effects estimator. We propose a test of social interaction that is based on data on triplets, and find some evidence for social interaction. We then use an instrumental-variable estimation strategy that recovers consistently the returns to birth weight. Our estimation results indicate that the returns to birth weight are closer to the sibling-based estimates than the twin fixed-effects estimates reported in the previous literature.

Date: 2015-09
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