Childhood Health and Human Capital: New Evidence from Genetic Brothers in Arms

John Parman ()

The Journal of Economic History, 2015, vol. 75, issue 1, 30-64

Abstract: Negative shocks to childhood health can have a lasting impact on the economic success of an individual by altering families' schooling investment decisions. This article introduces a new dataset of brothers serving in World War II and uses it to demonstrate that improvements in childhood health led to substantial increases in educational attainment in the first one-half of the twentieth century. By exploiting variation in health within families, the data show that this relationship between childhood health and educational attainment holds even after controlling for both observed and unobserved household and environmental characteristics.

Date: 2015
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