The Costs of Low Birth Weight

Douglas Almond, Kenneth Chay and David S. Lee

No 10552, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Birth weight has emerged as the leading indicator of infant health and welfare and the central focus of infant health policy. This is because low birth weight (LBW) infants experience severe health and developmental difficulties that can impose enormous costs on society. But would the prevention of LBW generate equally sizable cost savings and health improvements? Estimates of the return to LBW-prevention from cross-sectional associations may be biased by omitted variables that cannot be influenced by policy, such as genetic factors. To address this, we compare the hospital costs, health at birth, and infant mortality rates between heavier and lighter infants from all twin pairs born in the United States. We also examine the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy the leading risk factor for LBW in the United States on health among singleton births after controlling for detailed background characteristics. Both analyses imply substantially smaller effects of LBW than previously thought, suggesting two possibilities: 1) existing estimates overstate the true costs and consequences of LBW by at least a factor of four and by as much as a factor of 20; or 2) different LBW-preventing interventions have different health and cost consequences, implying that policy efforts that presume a single return to reducing LBW will necessarily be suboptimal.

JEL-codes: H51 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-evo and nep-hea
Note: EH CH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Published as Almond, Douglas, Kenneth Y. Chay and David S. Lee. "The Costs Of Low Birth Weight," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2005, v120(3,Aug), 1031-1083.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10552.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Costs of Low Birth Weight (2005)
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:nbr:nberwo:10552

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10552

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().