The Impact of Children's Public Health Insurance Expansions on Educational Outcomes
Phillip Levine and
Diane Schanzenbach
Forum for Health Economics & Policy, 2009, vol. 12, issue 1, 28
Abstract:
This paper examines the impact of public health insurance expansions through both Medicaid and SCHIP on children's educational outcomes, measured by 4th and 8th grade reading and math test scores, available from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We use a triple difference estimation strategy, taking advantage of the cross-state variation over time and across ages in children's health insurance eligibility. Using this approach, we find that test scores in reading, but not math, increased for those children affected at birth by increased health insurance eligibility. A 50 percentage point increase in eligibility is found to increase reading test scores by 0.09 standard deviations. We also examine whether the improvements in educational outcomes can be at least partially attributed to improvements in health status itself. First, we provide further evidence that increases in eligibility are linked to improvements in health status at birth. Second, we show that better health status at birth (measured by rates of low birth-weight and infant mortality), is linked to improved educational outcomes. Although the methods used to support this last finding do not completely eliminate potentially confounding factors, we believe it is strongly suggestive that improving children's health will improve their classroom performance.
Keywords: test scores; health insurance; birth weight; Medicaid; SCHIP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1558-9544.1137 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.
Related works:
Chapter: The Impact of Children's Public Health Insurance Expansions on Educational Outcomes (2009)
Working Paper: The Impact of Children's Public Health Insurance Expansions on Educational Outcomes (2009) 
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:bpj:fhecpo:v:12:y:2009:i:1:n:1
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/fhep/html
DOI: 10.2202/1558-9544.1137
Access Statistics for this article
Forum for Health Economics & Policy is currently edited by Dana Goldman
More articles in Forum for Health Economics & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().