Mother’s Education and Birth Weight

Arnaud Chevalier and Vincent O'Sullivan

No 2640, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Low birth weight has considerable short and long-term consequences and leads to high costs to the individual and society even in a developed economy. Low birth weight is partially a consequence of choices made by the mother pre- and during pregnancy. Thus policies affecting these choices could have large returns. Using British data, maternal education is found to be positively correlated with birth weight. We identify a causal effect of education using the 1947 reform of the minimum school leaving age. Change in compulsory school leaving age has been previously used as an instrument, but has been criticised for mostly picking up time trends. Here, we demonstrate that the policy effects differ by social background and hence provide identification across cohorts but also within cohort. We find modest but heterogenous positive effects of maternal education on birth weight with an increase from the baseline weight ranging from 2% to 6%.

Keywords: returns to education; health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I29 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2007-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hea and nep-ltv
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2640.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Mother's education and birth weight (2007)
Working Paper: Mother's education and birth weight (2007)
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:iza:izadps:dp2640

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().