Do lower birth weight babies have lower grades? Twin fixed effect and instrumental variable method evidence from Taiwan

Ming-Jen Lin and Jin-Tan Liu
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: 明仁 林

Social Science & Medicine, 2009, vol. 68, issue 10, 1780-1787

Abstract: By combining two unique Taiwanese datasets, this paper investigates how birth weight affects grades at age 15 years. To tackle the endogeneity problem caused by omitted variables, we first compare birth weight and grade variation within twins. We find that birth weight does increase grades but only when both twins weigh less than 3000Â g at birth, which indicates that the effect is non-linear, and when the weight difference between the twins is larger than 200Â g. Furthermore, twin fixed effect estimates are similar to the ordinary least squares (OLSs) ones. We then use the public health budget and the number of doctors in the county where the children were born as instrumental variables for the children's birth weight. We found that instrumental variable estimates are significant only for the less educated (

Keywords: Instrumental; variables; Lower; birth; weight; Twin; fixed; effect; Taiwan; Education; School; grades; Adolescents; Twins (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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