Left behind: intergenerational transmission of human capital in the midst of HIV/AIDS

Mevlude Akbulut-Yuksel and Belgi Turan ()

Journal of Population Economics, 2013, vol. 26, issue 4, 1523-1547

Abstract: This paper provides evidence on how adverse health conditions affect the transfer of human capital from one generation to the next. We explore the differential exposure to HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa as a substantial health shock to both household and community environment. We utilize the recent rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys for 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. First, we find that an additional year of maternal education leads to a 0.37-year increase in children’s years of schooling in the developing economies in sub-Saharan Africa. Second, our results show that mother’s HIV status has substantial detrimental effects on inheritability of human capital. We find that the association between infected mothers’ and their children’s human capital is 30 % less than the general population. Finally, focusing only on noninfected mothers and their children, we show that HIV prevalence in the community also impairs the intergenerational human capital transfers even if mother is HIV negative. The findings of this paper are particularly distressing for these already poor, HIV-torn countries as in the future they will have even lower overall level of human capital due to the epidemic. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013

Keywords: HIV/AIDS; Intergenerational transmission; Education; Human capital investment; O12; I1; I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00148-012-0439-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Left Behind: Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in the Midst of HIV/AIDS (2010)
Working Paper: Left Behind: Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital in the Midst of HIV/AIDS (2010)
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:spr:jopoec:v:26:y:2013:i:4:p:1523-1547

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-012-0439-3

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().