The Nutrition-Learning Nexus: Evidence from Indonesia

Maria Lo Bue

No 183, Courant Research Centre: Poverty, Equity and Growth - Discussion Papers from Courant Research Centre PEG

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of nutritional status on subsequent educational achievements for a large sample of Indonesians children. I use a long term panel data set and apply a maternal fixed effect plus an instrumental variables estimator in order to control for possible correlation between some of the components of the error term and the main independent variable which will likely to cause a bias in the estimates. Differences in nutritional status between siblings are identified by using exposure in the earliest months of life to the drought associated with the Indonesian wildfires of late 1997. Estimation results show that health capital (measured by height-for-age z-scores at childhood) significantly and positively affects the number of completed grades of schooling and the score on cognitive test. Nevertheless, I only find little robust evidence of an effect on the readiness to enter school.

Keywords: Educational achievement; child nutrition; siblings’ difference models; environmental shocks; Indonesia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I20 O15 O53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-08-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-sea
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:got:gotcrc:183

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