It's a Long Walk: Lasting Effects of Maternity Ward Openings on Labor Market Performance

Volha Lazuka
Additional contact information
Volha Lazuka: University of Southern Denmark, Lund University, and IZA

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2023, vol. 105, issue 6, 1411-1425

Abstract: Being born in a hospital versus having a traditional birth attendant at home represents the most common early life policy change worldwide. By applying a difference-in-differences approach to register-based individual-level data on the total population, this paper explores the long-term economic effects of the opening of new maternity wards as an early life quasi-experiment. It first finds that the reform substantially increased the share of hospital births and reduced early neonatal mortality. It then shows sizable long-term effects on labor income, unemployment, health-related disability, and schooling. Small-scale local maternity wards yield a larger social rate of return than large-scale hospitals.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_01134
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:tpr:restat:v:105:y:2023:i:6:p:1411-1425

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().